Ji)^>T( A BOOK OF R. L. S, KOI5ER I LOUIS STK\ liNSON AT THE AGE (IF 26 A BOOK OF R. L. S WORKS, TRAVELS, FRIENDS, AND COMMENTATORS BY GEORGE E. BROWN WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK CHARLES SGRIBNER^S SONS 1919 -< r> /^//•j/ Published in igig y o o s £ B PREFACE THE chief aim of this book is to provide a com- mentary on his works as far as possible from Stevenson's own standpoint by showing the circum- stances in which they w^ere written, their history in his hands, and his judgments of them. Only works available in current volumes or the complete edi- tions are included : no attempt has been made to deal with those of his contributions to periodicals which have not been reprinted. The scheme of the volume also embraces references to members of his family, and to his more or less intimate friends as well as the places directly associated with his wandering life. In developing this plan it was easy to make the work also a bibhography, and by the kindness of Mr. J. Herbert Slater the present values of first editions have been quoted from the latter's Bibhographical Handbook, and from recent issues of ' Book Prices Current.' The prices paid by collectors have shown great fluctuations, but chiefly in an upward direction, during the last few years. Most of those quoted have been paid during the present period of inflated currency, and therefore should be taken as more roughly approximate than such prices commonly are. AM .^ T^ (r £> vi A BOOK OF R. L. S. Acknowledgment needs to be made first and chiefly to Messrs. Methuen for permission to quote the ' Letters ' edited and arranged by Sir Sidney Colvin, and published by them. As will be seen, the present modest contribution to Stevensonian literature depends upon its use of that material. Sir Graham Balfour's ' Life ' and the late Colonel Prideaux's * Bibliography ' must also be named as two other works indispensable to any writer on Stevenson. In adopting an alphabetical arrangement, it has been thought that the convention of the professional indexer, viz., the rigid adherence to title except for the transposition of * A,' * An,' or ' The ' in titles having these beginnings, was not the most suitable for the general reader. Therefore, where the title of a paper contains a word which emphatically marks the subject, that word has been chosen to determine the alphabetical position. Thus ' Some Portraits by Raebum ' is placed in R, and ' A Plea for Gas Lamps ' in G, but in the absence of this excuse a position is allotted in accordance with the untransposed title. The index will, it is hoped, make good any deficiencies which this compromise may involve. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Robert Louis Stevenson at the Age of 26. Frontispiece TO FACE PAGE Skerryvorf, Alum Chine Road, Bourne- mouth, THE HOME OF R. L. StEVENSON AND HIS WIFE, FROM 1884 TO 1887 . . 40 No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, where Stevenson was born, Nov. 13, 1850 . 86 Greyfriars Churchyard, Edinburgh, and THE 'Resting Graves' of the Cove- nanters ....... 128 No. 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh, the home OF Thomas Stevenson from 1857 to his death in 1887 166 R. L. Stevenson at the age of 40 , . . 232 Swanston Cottage, Pentland Hills, the Summer Home taken by Thom.as Stevenson when his son was seventeen 256 Greyfrl^rs Churchyard, Edinburgh. . . 284 AMERICAN PUBLISHERS' NOTE In Mr. Brown^s valuable book there Is one statement which it is perhaps worth while to correct in an American edition, from data which could hardly be accessible to any one but Mr. Stevenson's American publishers. On page 288 the statement that "The Wrong Box" was offered to Scribners for five thousand dollars and that the offer was not accepted is erroneous. The story was accepted at the sum named for the American rights and was pub- lished by Messrs. Scribner in America simulta- neously with the publication in London. A BOOK OF R. L. S. ACROSS THE PLAINS While now no doubt everybody knows that the experiences of this paper formed the second stage in the great adventure of Stevenson's hfe, the omission of all reference to his business aboard the emigrant train still gives an air of strangeness to such a personal narration. Obviously R. L. S. could not disclose the bald truth that he had run away from his home in Edinburgh, with very slight means, to marry the lady of whom, so he thought, his parents would disapprove. It was impossible for an author, already of some reputation, to in- dulge a habit of public confidences to the degree of relating matters of intimacy which touched others as closely as himself. His isolation from his parents which he thought necessary for this project was a thought which pained him, for in some verses, written on the emigrant train, of the thoughts of home awakened by the crowing of a cock there are the lines recently published in New Poems and Variant Readings : — He brings to me dear voices of the past, The old land and the years. My father calls for me, My weeping spirit hears. ,2. :;; :■:..': [a'BjSoK OF R. L. S. At Monterey' aiter a short visit to Mrs. Osboume in San Francisco, he wrote the story of his wearisome fortnight's journey across the American continent. It was the fatigues of this journey probably more than the steerage passage across the Atlantic which threw back Stevenson's health to the low pitch at which it kept until his arrival in the South Seas. During the years preceding it he had led a mildly active outdoor life. At Monterey, in a letter to his friend Gosse, he recalled that it was * six years all but a few months since I was obliged to spend twenty-four hours in bed.' And then, immediately, in a repining mood : ' but death is no bad friend ; a few aches and gasps and we are alone : like the truant child I am beginning to grow weary in this big, jostling city, and could run to my nurse even though she should have to whip me before putting me to bed.' There were still darker passages for him in San Francisco before his marriage the follow- ing summer, but his self-enforced monetary strin- gency then came to an end by his father's remit- tances, and his return journey to New York with his wife and stepson certainly did not repeat th( emigrants' experiences. The paper, first published in ' Longman's Maga zine ' in 1883, represents an abridgment and re writing of the manuscript, and is so reprinted in th volume Across the Plains. The volume issued as Across the Plains contair in addition to the title essay those on The Old PaciJ Capital (Monterey), Fontainebleau, The Epilogue An Inland Voyage, Random Memories (of his ei A BOOK OF R. L. S. 3 gineering da3^s), The Lantern Bearers, A Chapter on Dreams, Beggars, Letter to a Young Gentleman, Pulvis et Umbra, and A Christm.as Sermon, most of them contributions to * Scribner's Magazine ' in 1888 [cat. 38). These essays are separately con- sidered, each under its own title, on other pages of this book. Their selection and arrangement for Across the Plains were undertaken at Stevenson's wish by Sir Sidney Colvin, whose reference in his preface is to the cumulative effect of nearly ten years' invalidism upon Stevenson's original buoy- ancy of thought and outlook. If, in some of these essays, * the lights seem a little turned down,' it was not to be wondered at. They were written at Saranac in the winter of 1887-8, when it was plain that the change from Bournemouth to the United States held no hope for a permanent remedy of Stevenson's ill-health. Yet certain of them will be recognized as the most perfect of the essays ; des- tined to live, as Henry James writes of them, as Stevenson's * mascuhne wisdom and remarkable final sanity.' The original edition of Across the Plains of 317 pages, issued in 1892 by Messrs. Chatto & Windus, has a value of about 15s. ADMIRAL GUINEA Of the four plays written in collaboration with Henley, Admiral Guinea, if without the literary quality of Beau Austin or Macaire, is on the whole the most dramatic, though its type is one of a low order. The sinister character of the blind sailor 4 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Pew, made less sinister but more horrible by a vein of jocularity, is borrowed of course from Treasure Island. The reformed slaver captain was appar- ently the invention of Henley. Much of the piece was written by Stevenson on first settling at Bourne- mouth in September 1884, though Henley's was plainly the moving and optimistic spirit in the joint enterprise. Stevenson seems to have been per- suaded to embark on these dramatic schemes against his better judgment, and a year later, in seeking to disillusion Henley of their prospect of material success, declares that he finds the play ' a low, black, dirty blackguard piece — vomitable in many parts — simply vomitable. Pew is in places a re- proach to both art and man.' This was plainly written in the heat of the moment, but in discour- aging Henley's effort to launch the plays Stevenson, as in many other instances, anticipated the critics. The piece was first performed at a matinee at the Avenue Theatre, London, November 29, 1897, and was revived at the Royalty (Repertory) Theatre, Glasgow, April 19, 1909, and at His Majesty's Theatre, London, June 4, 1909. AES TRIPLEX An essay which is typical of Stevenson's practical philosophy of life as he conceived it in the twenties. It is characteristic that with death as his subject he should dwell mainly on the guiding principles of life. His theme is courageous disregard of the con- ventional counsels of prudence by the observance of which a man misses the full exercise of his powers. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 5 This eminently Stevensonian philosophy is crystal- lized in the passage : ' Does not life go down with a better grace foaming in full body over a precipice than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas.' The essay was written towards the end of 1877, or beginning of 1878 {cet. 28), that is, near the end of the four years of his early hfe in which his health was passable. It appeared in the ' Comhill Maga- zine ' of April 1878, and is collected in Virginihus Puerisque. ALPINE DIVERSIONS As the papers Davos in Winter and Health and Mountains very plainly show% Stevenson {cBt. 30 and 31) found scarcely any pleasure in the confined mountain landscape of Davos during his two winters' exile there. And his notes on the indoor hfe of the place contained in the present essay emphasize the sense of imprisonment which is to be seen in all these records of his feelings. The performers who visited the hotels appealed to him from the fact that ' they at least are moving : they bring with them the senti- ment of the open road : yesterday, perhaps, they were in Tyrol, and next week they will be in Lom- bardy, while all we sick folk still simmer in our mountain prison.' The innate love of wandering which, besides motives of health, led R. L. S. over the world is seen as strongly developed in these pages of its mortification as in books Hke Travels with a Donkey, which tell of its indulgence. The outdoor sports were the only features of the hfe at Davos which moved Stevenson to any pitch of en- 6 A BOOK OF R. L. S. thusiasm. He skated and tobogganed, and found in the headlong sohtary dash on a toboggan in a night of stars amidst these mountains ' a new excite- ment to the Hfe of man upon his planet.' The paper appeared in the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' February 26, 1881, and is collected in Essays of Travel. AMATEUR EMIGRANT, THE Evidently the title of this paper was intended to apply to the whole story of Stevenson's journey to California in August 1879 {est. 29) to arrange his marriage with Mrs. Osboume. The words fit the record of his experiences both as practically a steer- age passenger and on the second stage of the journey — by rail across America — which forms the subject of Across the Plains [q.v.). At Monterey in October he wrote that he had drafted about half of what was to be a book. The Amateur Emigrant. He com- pleted it, and actually disposed of it to a publisher. His father, however, objecting to the publication of a work which clearly provided the opportunity for all kinds of inferences, the rights were bought back, and the paper was not allowed to appear — and then only after revisions and abridgments — until its in- clusion in the Edinburgh edition in 1895. Its great realism, apart from the description of natural effects, was a new departure for Stevenson, who wrote that he had ' sought to be prosaic in view of the nature of the subject.' A later opinion was that it was * a pretty heavy emphatic piece of pedantry : but I don't care : the public, I verily believe, will hke it/ However, the self-enforced necessity to support A BOOK OF R. L. S. 7 himself by his writings having been removed by his father's bestowal of a competency, he was content to suppress the paper until the scheme of a complete edition of his works was undertaken. In his books as at present published it forms the first of the Essays of Travel. ANSTRUTHER This Fifeshire coast town is notable among the many places visited by R. L. S. in having provided the material for the two essaj^s, written twenty years afterwards, The Coast of Fife and The Edu- cation of an Engineer. Stevenson was there for a month of his eighteenth year for the purpose of studying the building of harbour works, and was soon ' utterly sick of this grey, grim, sea-beaten hole/ The legends and names of Fife interested him a good deal more than marine engineering ; and if he preserved the recollection of Wick, whither he proceeded, as the type of an unpleasant place re- quiring a peculiar philosophy for its enjoyment, Anstruther was coupled with it in that denomination, His lodging was Cunzie (or Kenzie) House, a solid two-storey building, with an outside wooden stair- way leading to the upper floor. APOLOGY FOR IDLERS, AN This essay, written when he was twenty-six, was, as Stevenson told Mrs. Sitwell, ' really a defence of R. L. S.' Stevenson felt himself marked as an idler in more than one respect. In the circles of his father's friends in Edinburgh his systematic truantry 8 A BOOK OF R. L. S. from his engineering and legal studies had earned him that reputation : among the literary men in London whose friendship he had made in his early twenties he was still received as something of a dilettante. Therefore his paper need not be taken as the development of a theme chosen merely to provide a medium for his art as an essayist. At this time of his life his spirit was in revolt against the exaltation of humdrum industry and material success to the places accorded to them by writers like Dr. Samuel Smiles. It is easy to understand that having come to his own profession by indus- triously neglecting two others, he was inclined to disparage the persistent application which stolidly follows the appointed path. There was also in Stevenson much of a boy's contempt for the serious conventionally grown-up view of life. With what satisfaction he hailed the young boating men of Brussels in The Inland Voyage who, after business hours, became serieiix. His idler is not the lazy person, but one intensely busy in the business of happiness, a view which characterized Stevenson's thought throughout his life. The essay, after having been declined by * Macmillan's Magazine,' appeared in the ' Comhill ' of July 1877, and is placed in the volume Virginibus Ptierisque. APPEAL TO THE CLERGY OF THE CHURCH OF SCOTLAND, AN An anonymous pamphlet, written when he was twenty-four, is the first of many sermons contained A BOOK OF R. L. S. 9 in Stevenson's writings, and was addressed, of all people, to the preachers themselves. Of this plea for renunciation of sectarian differences he wrote to his friend Colvin : ' I am going to launch on Scotch ecclesiastical affairs, in a tract addressed to the Clergy ; in which, doctrinal matters being laid aside, I contend simply that they should be just and dignified men at a certain crisis : this for the honour of humanity. Its authorship must, of course, be secret or the publication would be useless. You shall have a copy of course, and may God help you to understand it.' The pamphlet, when issued by Messrs. Blackwood in February 1875, attracted, Sir Sidney Colvin believes, no attention whatever. It was not republished until its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition, and is not placed in any of the current volumes. APPIN MURDER In Kidnapped R. L. S. interweaves with the adven- tures of David Balfour a real fragment of the stormy histoiy of the Highlands, which has thus come to a degree of prominence it would not otherwise have secured. This is the Appin murder of 1752, not a year earlier, as Stevenson makes it from no appar- ent motive. In Chapter XVII. David, after his escape from the brig and sufferings on the islet, is pitchforked into the crime, and exchanges one series of misfortunes for another. In Catriona the pivot of the story of his further adventures is the trial of James Stewart on the charge of the murder, but so much is taken for granted in the way of the reader's 10 A BOOK OF R. L. S. knowledge of the real events and persons, that a brief recital of this page of Scottish history is a needful commentary, and one which, as R. L. S. admitted, his friend Andrew Lang ' bleated ' for him to supply as an introduction to the two works when published in a single volume. The Appin murder was the outcome of the dis- affected state of many parts of the Scottish High- lands which resulted from the sternness with which the last desperate effort to restore the Stuart dynasty was punished by the Government of George ii. After the short-lived adventure of Prince Charles Edward (the Young Chevalier) in the Jacobite rising of 1745, estates of those on the Stuart side were forfeited and agents appointed for the collection of rents, letting of farms, etc. As Mr. Lang says, the Highlands in 1752 were boiling like a cauldron. The then Duke of Argyll (head of the Clan Campbell) was on the side of the Government in the rebelHon ; hence hatred of Jacobite clans — Stewarts, Camerons, and others — for the Campbells was intensified by the circumstances of the time. The scene of the murder was the Appin country, the peninsula of coast between Loch Leven and Loch Creran on the Linnhe Loch. Ardshiel, of the Appin Stewarts, though not their chief, was in exile in France after the '45, his tenantry continuing to pay their rents to him, and making a like payment to the Government. In his absence James Stewart of the Glen, otherwise Stewart of Acharn, from the name of his farm, was leader of his clansmen. He had taken part in Prince Charles's rising, but had A BOOK OF R. L. S. ii been pardoned. On the other hand, Alan Breck iq.v.), a Stewart, to whom James had been a kind of foster-father, was still an outlaw. The third char- acter in the tragedy was Captain Colin Campbell of Glenure — Colin Roy, * Red Fox,' and Red Colin, as he was variously called — factor of the Ardshiel estates. In the spring of 1752 there was a dispute between James and Glenure as to the expulsion of certain tenants on the estate. At the end of April James had returned from Edinburgh where he had sought to lodge pleas for the suspension of the evictions. On the 14th May, Glenure, with an Edinburgh lawyer, Mungo Campbell, a sheriff's officer, and a servant, left Fort Wilham to carry out the evictions the next day. The party crossed Ballachulish Ferry, familiar to motorists in the Highlands, and proceeded coastwise by the hillside road towards Kintalline. Then, from the slopes of the wood of Lettermore there came a shot, the Campbell fell to the ground, and in a few moments was dead. His companion saw a man with a short dark-coloured coat hastening up the hillside carrying a gun. The murderer made good his escape. The authorities were left without a single piece of direct evidence of the authorship of the crime. Alan Breck was known to have been in the neighbourhood on that same day. He speedily sought safety in the mountains, and eventually in France. Throughout Appin rigorous measures were taken. James of the Glen with his sons and servants was placed under arrest. From the outset he was subjected to treat- 12 A BOOK OF R. L. S. ment which went far beyond the legal usage of the time. For months he was not allowed to see a lawyer, or even to know the precise charge against him. The savage purpose of this isolation was that his trial might not take place in Edinburgh before an unbiased jury : the Campbells manoeuvred for it to be heard in the Argyll Circuit Court at Inveraray before a jury of their own clan. It was not until August 21 that a move was made in charging Alan Breck and James Stewart as jointly guilty of the murder, Alan as principal, and James as accessory. The trial was fixed for September 21, but it w^as only three days beforehand that the unfortunate James was able to confer with his counsel. The judicial farce was carried to even greater lengths. Although three judges sat on the bench, one of them, the Duke of Argyll, had the slightest judicial qualifications, but, as in other instances, had had the office of Lord Justice-General conferred upon him by virtue of his rank. On no other occasion had such an occupant of the position tried a case in a Circuit Court. Here Argyll sat as head of the Clan Campbell to condemn an enemy, pursuing his purpose by the compliance of his professional colleagues. More- over, the jury was one almost wholly of Campbells, and they so little sensible of the gravity of their office that one of them broke into a speech of the prisoner's counsel with the ejaculation ' Pray, sir, cut it short.' Of the counsel for the Crown, R. L. S. in Catriona makes special use of the Lord Advocate, the Right Hon. Sir Wilham Grant of Prestongrange (q.v), and A BOOK OF R.L. S. 13 of Simon Fraser {q.v.), otherwise the Master of Lovat. The latter had fought for Prince Charles in the '45, had been pardoned, and thus, in taking part in the prosecution of a former fellow member of the Jacobite party, is presented in an ugly light. R. L. S., with perhaps an instinct of his character, makes of him a most repulsive figure, the drawing of which was the subject of public protests by the Clan Frazer when Kidnapped was published. The prosecution sought first to establish the guilt of Breck, but the evidence amounted to no more than that Breck had used threatening language in regard to Glenure, that he was in the neighbourhood on the day of the murder, was wearing a dark grey suit, and disappeared immediately afterwards ; all of which fell short of positive proof. Yet if Breck's guilt had been proved, the evidence in favour of James's connivance was even more slender. It scarcely went beyond the known friendship of James and Alan, and the former's ill-will to- wards Glenure. Of real evidence of the conniv- ance in the murder there was none which could be classed as proof. One incident connected with the trial is used by R. L. S. for much of the motif of Catriona. In 1752 one of the greatest rascals which Scotland ever pro- duced, namely, James MacGregor More {q.v), or Drummond, lay in Tolbooth jail in Edinburgh. Him James Stewart had visited there when on business of the Ardshiel tenants. After the murder Drummond, with characteristic villainy, proffered evidence to the effect that on the occasion of his visit 14 A BOOK OF R. L. S. James sought to induce him (according to other accounts, his brother Robin Oig) to murder Glenure, and he had promised to commit the crime. The cunning villain knew that if he were to appear as a witness he must first be pardoned. The relatives of Glenure would have been glad to have obtained this evidence, but the Government prosecutors very rightly refused to admit the testimony of a rogue of his evil notoriety. These facts, which are estab- lished, He behind the comings of James More to the Advocate's house in Catriona ; and R. L. S. also makes use of the unverified tradition that though Drummond did not appear at the trial his evidence was privately circulated among the jury. In the early hours of Sunday, September 24, the trial came to a close, in accordance with Scots criminal law, with the speech of the accused's counsel. Of Argyll's summing up, if there was any, there is no record. For fifty hours without intermission the jury had attended the proceedings, and the suggestion was made that they should rest before considering their verdict. But they consulted at once, and within four hours unanimously returned a verdict of guilty. Argyll's address to the con- demned man which followed was an harangue in which clan hatred overpowered calm justice. On November 8, 1752, in a spot near to the place of the murder, James of the Glen was hanged. The written statement which he read to the spectators contained the most touching appeals to his friends to refrain from hatred of his persecutors — a poignant end to an act of political revenge which, as various eminent A BOOK OF R. L. S. 15 writers have agreed, is a blot on Scottish judicial records. Who was the real murderer of Glenure ? Accord* ing to students of the mystery such as the late Andrew Lang and Mr. David N. Mackay, the secret is kept to this day in several Stewart families. Mr. Mackay concludes that Alan Breck did not fire the shot though he was ' in the know.' Mr. Lang also, who claims to know as much of the secret as is known, apparently believes Alan to have been an accessory. These writers repeat the story of the other man who on the day of the execution had to be bound with ropes. He wished to save James's neck at the eleventh hour by his declaration, but his kinsmen's view was that he would onl}^ share his fate. R. L. S. in the preface to Kidnapped is em- phatic that tradition absolves Alan, but it would seem that his conviction rests on no more substantial ground than that in 1882 when at Lochearnhead, which is only forty miles from the scene of the murder, he made some inquiries. The details of the Appin crime, however, had been a study of his, for in 1881, when his application for the professorship of history and law at Edinburgh University was before the electors, he had had in mind writing and submitting an essay * The Murder of Red Colin,' but the theme was not used until embodied in the adventures of David Balfour. The most complete account of the trial is ' The Trial of James Stewart,' by David N. Mackay (Edinburgh, Wm. Hodge & Co.). ' The Appin Murder,' by the same author and pubhshers, is a i6 A BOOK OF R. L. S. short and popular version. Mr. Lang, in including the murder in his ' Historical Mysteries ' (Smith Elder, 1904), says as much (or as little) as is com- patible with non-disclosure of the secret which he declared he knew but might not tell. ARCHER, AVILLLIM (1856- ) Stevenson's junior by six years, Mr. Archer was one of the first of those, altogether unknown to him, to appreciate his w^ork. An anonymous review of The Child's Garden of Verses brought them together through Stevenson writing the four words ' Now who are you ? ' The reply disclosing its author- ship, the sequel was the interchange of letters, visits to Bournemouth, and a close friendship which lasted until Stevenson's death, and is embodied in some of the most intimate of the ' Letters.' Mr. Archer's son to whom, as a child of three, Stevenson wrote the amusing letters — to ' my dear Tomarcher ' — had grown up to be a man and a soldier, and fought and perished in the repulse of the Germans' attack on Mount Kemmel in April 1918, the engagement in which the final victory of the Entente was decisively determined. He enlisted twice in the infantry, first returning from America on the outbreak of war, and afterwards resigning a commission in the Ordnance Service to rejoin his regiment, the London Scottish. As a mere baby he was devoted to The Child's Garden of Verses, and could repeat many of the poems before he could speak plainly. It was this and other anecdotes of him that no doubt led Stevenson, who never actually saw him, to take an interest in him. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 17 ART OF WRITING, ESSAYS IN THE The volume first issued by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1905, containing the papers on Realism and on Style in Literature, with others less directly appropriate to the title. These are : The Morality of the Profession of Letters, Books which have Influenced Me, My First Book — Treasure Island, The Genesis of the Master of Ballantrae, and the Preface to the last-named, written but not used. ARMOUR, MARGARET Author of a little book ' The Home and Early Haunts of Robert Louis Stevenson ' (Edinburgh, Riverside Press, 1895). Shght sketches of Steven- son's associations with Edinburgh, Colinton, and Swans ton. ATTWATER The extraordinary figure of the Cambridge man^ turned pearl-fisher and merciless evangelist in The Ebb Tide. His ' manner and way of speech ' were modelled, as Sir Sidney Colvin has told us, on a Cambridge friend, A. G. Dew-Smith {q.v.) : ' a man of fine artistic taste and mechanical genius, with a silken, somewhat foreign urbanity of bearing.' R. L. S., who expressed more doubts of The Ebb Tide than of any other of his works, thought Attwater ' no end of a courageous attempt . . . how far successful is another affair.' A later judgment was : * A Uttle indecision about Attwater, not much/ i8 A BOOK OF R. L. S. AUTOBIOGRAPHY The most real, if often disguised, autobiography of R. L. S., is scattered among his writings, not only in the essays of Memories and Portraits, the preface to which marks them as such, and in the books of travel in France and America, but in almost every later essay ; in the Child's Garden of Verses, and pre-eminently in his Letters (q.v.), the most complete edition of which is that of 1911 (Methuen). It was an inherent part of Stevenson's nature to put him- self in his published writings. An essay on child's play or idlers became in his hands a good part auto- biography. While critics, as he said, ' murmur over my consistent egotism,' his readers derive in these confidences the peculiar charm which R. L. S. has for them, and many no doubt a pleasure in piecing them with the real doings of his hfe. But of formal autobiography there exist some fragments written in Cahfomia in 1880 (est. 30) on the manuscript of which two years afterwards Stevenson pencilled : ' These notes contain more damned idiocy and self- conceit than I ever saw printed in the same space anywhere else.' Apparently the pieces of autobiography contained in the unabridged edition of the ' Life ' by Sir Graham Balfour are the notes to which this com- ment apphed, but are not the whole of them. Their quotation is there acknowledged as by courtesy of Stevenson's stepdaughter, Mrs. Strong, by whom an autobiography was included in a sale of many other Stevenson manuscripts in New York in 1914. This manuscript advertized as bearing Stevenson's savage A BOOK OF R. L. S. 19 annotation, therefore seems to be that quoted in the * Life.' where it is described as consisting of three ' books.' Book I., presuming there was more of it, is quoted only to the extent of a passage sketching the aunt, Miss Jane Balfour {q.v.), by whom her father's manse at Colinton was made the pleasant holiday place for her many nephews and nieces. The sentence ' this little country manse was the centre of the world : and Aunt Jane represented Charity ' sums up Stevenson's glance back at this time upon his childhood there. Book II., all that exists of it and that but a fragment, is of the scanty pocket money (twelve pounds a year) allowed him until he was twenty-three, and of the society of ' seamen, chimney-sweeps, and thieves,' which he met in the inn kitchens which were the only places within his means. Book III., headed ' From Jest to Earnest,' and a narrative of some length, but in- complete, sketches his four earliest friends, viz., his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, Sir Walter Simpson, James Walter Ferrier, and Charles Baxter, somewhat in the vein of Talk and Talkers. But for the most part it details the absurdly harmless hoaxes, devised on an elaborate system, which the two Stevenson cousins exulted in circulating among the townsfolk of Edinburgh. These pranks were entered into for the pure joy of their absurdity : the relish of them was in nowise dulled by a complete ignorance of their reception, was, in fact, sharpened by the pictures of mystification which the pair afterwards proceeded to create in their imaginations. ' If they were silly/ R. L. S. recalled, ' they were never cruel/ 20 A BOOK OF R. L. S, and instanced the variations of the ' John Libbel ' hoax, the story of which looks incredibly foolish in print, but nevertheless reflects a part of Stevenson's personality which, in talk though not in practice, out- lasted for some years these days of mirth as a youth of twenty. AUTUMN EFFECT, AN The picture of a tramp which R. L. S. made alone in the Chiltern Hills in October 1874 [est. 24). High Wycombe, from w^hich he started, was then, as now, a busy little place, but Great Missenden and Wen- do ver, to which he journeyed along paths and by- roads which cross the chief highways of the Chilterns, had not then been linked to London, and partly suburbanized by the Metropolitan and Great Central railways. At Great Missenden the inn where he stayed is the Red Lion, and the sloping garden behind it must still be as when Stevenson smoked an early morning pipe there in conversation with the landlord (a Mr. Thoroughgood) as to the astro- nomical distance covered by the latter in driving the Wendover coach. His inn at Wendover was also the Red Lion, since destroyed by fire and rebuilt but not with the re-creation of the perfect parlour of the essay, though Peacock Farm above it on the hill can still reward the climber with its prospects and gay-plumaged birds. The Autumn Effect with its clear pictures of landscape and its intimate glimpses of people met by the way, was the first travel essay to be published, though not the first written. It appeared in the * Portfolio/ A BOOK OF R. L. S. 21 April and Ma}^ 1875, and is now placed in the Essays of Travel. BAGSTER'S ' PILGRIM'S PROGRESS ' The paper on the almost thumbnail illustrations to an edition of * The Pilgrim's Progress ' was written at Davos in 1881 {cBt. 31), and is one of the contri- butions to * The Magazine of Art ' (February 1882) of which Henley was then editor. It was evidently a commission, for to Henley he wrote : * I have nearly killed myself over Bunyan. . . . For some reason it proved one of the hardest things I ever tried to write : perhaps — but no — I have no theory to offer — it went against the spirit. But, as I say, I girt up my loins and nearly died of it.' The book, however, as is shown by the paper Rosa quo Locorum, was one famihar to him from infancy. The author of the tiny drawings in which Stevenson claimed to discover so close a kinship in imaginative power with Bunyan was, as Sir Sidney Colvin has ascer- tained, the eldest daughter of the publisher. Miss Eunice Bagster, the book having been first issued in 1845. Stevenson mentioned the paper for in- clusion in the Edinburgh edition, where it is accom- panied by reproductions of the drawings. It is now published with other criticisms in Lay Morals. BAILDON, H. BELLYSE (1849-1907) Author of * Robert Louis Stevenson : A Life Study in Criticism ' (London, Chatto & Windus, 1901). Mr. Baildon, who was lecturer in English literature at Vienna Universitv, and afterwards at 22 A BOOK OF R.L. S. Dundee, was with Stevenson at a small school kept by Mr. Robert Thomson, in Frederick Street, Edin- burgh, for backward and delicate boys. The chapter of his book on their schooldays together shows Stevenson at the age of fourteen or fifteen active as a contributor to the school magazine, the author of a romantic serial tale, which appeared in its pages. The sympathetic literary criticism which occupies the greater part of Mr. Baildon's book is supplemented by a list of references to some fifty or more articles on and reminiscences of Stevenson scattered through the English and American press. BALFOUR, SIR GRAHAM The author of the fullest and, if the tenn may be used, official biography of Stevenson is one of R. L. S.'s many cousins, the son of Dr. T. Graham Balfour, M.D., F.R.S. (president of the Royal Statis- tical Society), and since 1903 director of technical education in Staffordshire. For the last two and a half years of Stevenson's life his cousin made his home at Vailima. Although until his arrival there the two had never met, they speedily became on terms of the closest intimac}^ The publication of ' The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson ' was long postponed, partly from the fact that it was originally to have been written by Sir Sidney Colvin, and partly from the delay in collecting material from friends of Stevenson scattered throughout the world. But since its first appearance with Messrs. Methuen in 1901 it has passed through sixteen editions and, the violent review of it by Henley notwithstanding, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 23 ranks with the collected ' Letters ' as the most complete presentation of Stevenson which we have. BALFOUR, MISS JANE WHYTE (1816-1907) The essay, The Manse, which depicts Stevenson's relations, as a child, with his grandfather, Dr. Lewis Balfour, passes over the latter's daughter, Miss Jane Balfour, by whom for many years her father's house was managed. This * chief of my aunts ' of The Child's Garden, was the second mother to her many nephews and nieces, for whom Colinton Manse was a summer home. Stevenson has sketched her in a fragment of Autobiography (q.v.) as, in her youth, * very imperious, managing, and self-sufficient. But as she grew up she began to suffice for all the family as well. An accident on horseback made her nearly deaf and blind, and suddenly transformed this wilful empress into the most serviceable and amiable of women.' Her amiability is seen in her spoiling of young Louis, who had only to drop the smallest hint of what he wanted for it to be his. And as to domestic efficiency, a letter of hers (engaging a servant), preserved by a writer in ' Chambers's Journal,' may be allowed to tell its own tale : * Mr. Dalgleish mentions that you think the wages small, but ten shillings more in the half-year is the highest I have given since I had a nursery-maid, and as I will have your travelling expenses to pay I cannot promise you more than the three pounds for this half-year. However, if j^ou study to please me, be 24 A BOOK OF R. L. S. sober-minded, honest, obliging, and willing to do all you can to serve myself and Mr. Balfour, as well as be ready to do anything in your power for the young folk, I will give you five shillings above the three pounds. There are just four of our young folk statedly at home, and we are very often very quiet, though there is a hurry at a time. Any extra work that you may not be up to I promise to give you assistance in till you come into the way of it ; but it will be a great comfort to me, as well as to yourself if, when you have learned the method that I like, you endeavour to attend to it, not with eye- service as a man pleases, but in singleness of your heart, as unto God.' To Stevenson's mother also she ministered on the latter's return from Samoa after her son's death. The two sisters lived together in Edinburgh until Mrs. Stevenson's death, when the elder returned to the Colinton manse to die there in 1907 at the age of 91. BALFOUR, DR. LEWIS (GRANDFATHER) (1777- 1860) From Dr. Balfour, Stevenson took the name of Lewis. The spelling but not the pronunciation was changed to Louis when he was about eighteen, on account of its being the name also of an Edinburgh citizen much disliked both by him and his father. To his family and intimate friends he was always * Lewis.' The portrait of his grandfather in The Manse is one through Stevenson's eyes when a boy A BOOK OF R. L. S. 25 of from five to ten years in admiring fear of this old man of eighty. For nearly forty years Dr. Balfour was minister of Colinton, where his thirteen children were reared. His wife's father, and thus a great- grandfather of Stevenson's on his mother's side, was the Rev. Dr. Smith of Galston in Ayrshire, the sub- ject of Burns's mocking verse in the * Holy Fair ' : Smith opens out his cold harangues On practice and on morals, An' aft the godly pour in thrangs To gie the jars and barrels A lift that day. Among his intimate friends Stevenson would be chafhngly saluted with ' Smith opens out,' on the beginning of a sermon from him being discerned. He quotes the phrase against himself in one of his letters. BALLADS The most ambitious and, if one excepts the Child's Garden, the best of Stevenson's work in verse belongs to his thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth years. The ballad was a literary form which he did not attempt until his second visit to America. Ticonderoga, founded on a legend of the Camerons, was written at Saranac, and published in * Scribner's Magazine,' December 1887. In the following year at Tautira in the island of Tahiti, he learnt the legend which in The Song of Rahero is told with a flood of savage gusto in keeping with its tragic subject. The ballad, and that of The Feast of Famine, in which 26 A BOOK OF R.L. S. were ' strung together some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas/ were written during the stay at Tautira imposed by repairs to the ' Casco.' With Ttconderoga and the two shorter pieces, Heather Ale and Christmas at Sea, the latter of which had previously appeared in the * Scots Observer/ December 22, 1888, they formed the volume, Ballads, issued in 1891. They met with a cold reception from a public which could not have too much of their author's work in prose. Of the qualities which commended them to him Stevenson has something to say in a letter to H. B. Baildon : ' They failed to entertain a coy public, at which I wondered ; not that I set much account by my verses, which are the verses of Prosator ; but I do know how to tell a yarn ; and two of the yarns are great. Rahero is for its length a perfect folk-tale : savage and yet fine, full of tail-foremost moralit}^ ancient as the granite rocks ; if the historian, not to say the politician, could get that yam into his head, he would have leamt some of his ABC, But the average man at home cannot understand anti- quity ; he is sunk over the ears in Roman civili- sation ; and a tale like that of Rahero falls on his ears inarticulate. The "Spectator" said there was no psychology in it ; that interested me much ; my grandmother (as I used to call that able paper, and an able paper it is, and a fair one) cannot so much as observe the existence of savage psychology when it is put before it. I am at bottom a psycho- logist and ashamed of it : the tale seized me one- third because of its picturesque features, two-thirds A BOOK OF E.L. S. 27 because of its astonishing psychology, and the " Spectator " says there is none. I am going on with a lot of island work, exulting in the knowledge of a new world, " a new created world," and new men ; and I am sure my income will Decline and Fall off ; for the effort of comprehension is death to the in- telligent public, and sickness to the dull.' BARRIE, SIR JAMES MATTHEW (1860- ) Though they never met, R. L. S. had a great regard for the author of ' The Little Minister,' for the man equally with his writings. There were older friends whom he would have more dearly wished to have visited him in Samoa, but to none was he more pressing that he should come than to Barrie. * We would have some grand cracks,' he wrote, ' come, it will broaden your mind, and be the making of me.' Stevenson's admiration of Barrie's books no doubt arose partly from his sense of the distance between them in the drawing of feminine character, particularly in its tenderest relations. Writing to Barrie after reading ' The W^indow in Thrums,' he says : * Jess is beyond my frontier line : I could not touch her skirt : I have no such touch of glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist ; but it begins to look to me as if you were a man of genius.' A literary association of Barrie with Stevenson remains in the former's ' Sentimental Tommy,' a very partial portrait of R. L. S., as Sir Sidney Colvin has explained, in its drawing of the literary temperament and fine sense of the use of words , 28 A BOOK OF R. L. S. BAXTER, CHARLES (1848-1919) The death of Charles Baxter in April 1919 removed the last surviving intimate Edinburgh friend of R. L. S. Law was his profession ; for nearly twenty- five years he practised in Edinburgh as a Writer to the Signet. He was a fellow-member of Steven- son's in the Speculative Society, and the grave participator in many high-spirited absurdities. Their friendship was of that intimate kind which did not require to rest on a common pursuit. For the last seven or eight years of Stevenson's life Baxter took entire charge of his business affairs : it was he who, with Sir Sidney Colvin, arranged the issue of the Edinburgh edition of the collected works ; and in 1894 was on his way to Samoa when news of Steven- son's death reached him. Perhaps no letters reflect the variable moods of R. L. S. more truly than those to his old Edinburgh friend. They range from the humorous exchanges between * Thomson ' and * Johnstone ' to the last lines three months before his death which mark the depression he then felt : ' Strange that you should be beginning a new life, when I, who am a little your junior, am thinking of the end of mine. But I have hard lines : I have been so long waiting for death, I have unwrapped my thoughts from about life so long, that I have not a filament left to hold by : I have done my fiddling so long under Vesuvius that I have almost forgotten to play, and can only wait for the eruption, and think it long of coming. Literally no man has more wholly outlived life than L And still it is good fun/ A BOOK OF R. L. S. 29 BEACH OF FALESA, THE It is one of the tragic elements in Stevenson's prematurely ended life in the South Seas that he made comparatively little use of the wealth of material at his command there in the way of story- telling. With a measure of regained health came many distractions, social and pohtical ; and he was further handicapped by the obsession that he should be the sober chronicler of the history, customs, and legends of Polynesia, a task for which he made pro- digious plans only partially carried out. Thus the life of the islands is drawn upon in only a few stories, and in only one. The Beach of Falesa, with a degree of realism which satisfied him. Time has confirmed his own judgment by numbering it among his finest work. The germ of the story is one of other instances of the sudden inspiration, in creating a whole series of romantic incidents, which Stevenson drew from some natural scene. In A Gossip on Romance we have his avowal of how ' places speak distinctly ' as the fit scenes for murder, haunting spirits, or ship- wreck. That same sense of romance, developed in him when a mere child, was still more part of his nature in later hfe. In November 1890 he was spending day after day in the primitive forest which surroimded the house at Vailima, and writes of a new story ' which just shot through me like a bullet in one of my moments of awe in that tragic jungle.' He has the chapter headings in orderly shape and the title as ' The High Wood of Ulufanua.* The tale turns on the native dread of the spirit- 30 A BOOK OF R. L. S. devils in the woods, interwoven with which, as the reader knows, is the island life of natives and whites viewed through the eyes of a commonplace trader to whom bookkeepers and clerks in the old country were persons of splendid education. It is a picture of the South Seas, very different from the idylls of Hermann Melville in ' Typee ' and ' Omoo,' but we have it from his biographer that its realism fell far short, in the drawing of the dark side of island life, of the things which R. L. S. had seen for himself. By the time, nearly a year later, that it had passed through more than one process of re-writing, and with the alteration in its title, Stevenson took a most confident view of its merits : ' It is the first realistic South Sea story ; I mean with real South Sea char- acter and details of life. Everybody else who has tried, that I have seen, got carried away by the romance, and ended in a kind of sugar candy sham epic, and the whole effect was lost — there was no etching, no human grin, consequently no conviction. Now I have got the smell and the look of the thing a good deal. You will know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale than if you had read a library.' The story appeared as ' Uma ' in the ' Illustrated London News,' July 2 to August 6, 1892, and in the books is placed in Island Nights' Entertainments. BEAU AUSTIN The only one of the four plays written in colla- boration with Henley which, with the exception of Deacon Brodie, had even a succes d'estime upon the A BOOK OF R, L. S. 31 stage. It was written together with Admiral Guinea during Stevenson's first two months at Bournemouth in 1884, and was produced at the Hay market Theatre November 3, 1890, with Beerbohm Tree in the title part, and Fred Terry as Fenwick. Despite the hterary quahty and wit of the piece which have induced one critic, Mr. Arthur Symons, to call it the finest piece of comedy in action since the * School for Scandal,' and another, Mr. William Archer, to say that ' the aroma of literature can be brought over the footlights with stimulating and exhilarating effect,' it was not a success as a public performance. With Macaire it was played again at Her Majesty's Theatre on May 3, 1901, by a company of leading actors at a performance in aid of charity. BEGGARS The pair of character sketches w^hich form the first and second parts of this paper is plainly the product of Stevenson's youthful Edinburgh days w^hen, in the city and on the Pentland hills, he was the com- panion of seamen, chimney-sweeps, and thieves. The equality of his relationship to the old soldier and the knife-grinder connects them with the less reputable characters into whose acquaintance R. L. S. was thrown, in the years approaching man- hood, as much by lack of funds as by natural interest in the vagabond side of life. What he wrote of the self-respecting poor seeking charity only from those circumstanced like themselves was the subject of an inquiry from a correspondent who wished to know if Stevenson loiew^ this from experience. The reply 32 A BOOK OF R. L. S. from Samoa declared that the fact was impressed upon him at ' the house of a friend who was exceed- ingly poor, in fact, I may say destitute, and who lived in the attic of a very small house entirely in- habited by persons in varying stages of poverty. As he was also in ill-health, I made a habit of pass- ing my afternoon with him, and when there it was my part to answer the door. The steady procession of people, begging, and the expectant and confident manner in which they presented themselves, struck me more and more daily ; and I could not but re- member with surprise that though my father lived but a few streets away in a fine house, beggars scarce came to the door once a fortnight or a month. From that time forward I made it my business to inquire, and in the stories which I am very fond of hearing from all sorts and conditions of men, learned that in the time of their distress it was always from the poor they sought assistance, and almost always from the poor they got it.' The paper appeared in ' Scribner's,' March 1888 {cet. 38), and is placed in Across the Plains. BLACK ARROW, THE The publishers of ' Young Folks ' having asked for a successor to Treasure Island, Stevenson turned to the period of the Wars of the Roses as a setting for a tale of adventure frankly written for youthful readers. The book shows plainly enough that he was less at home in rural England of the fifteenth century than in the sea and island incidents of Treasure Island. The characters are puppets : the A BOOK OF R. L. S. 33 scenes, stage settings, and the talk, conventional. Moreover, as some one has said, Stevenson wrote Treasure Island for his own pleasure, but The Black Arrow because he was asked to write it. It was in fact written to conform to the type of story supplied to ' Young Folks ' by a writer, Alfred R. Phillips, whose serial ' Don Zalva, the Brave ' took precedence in position to Treasure Island when both were appearing together. Stevenson himself half despised it at the time. Whilst writing it (at Hy^res and ill in 1883 — cet. 33) he declares to Henley : * as my good Red Lion Counter begged me for another Butcher's Boy — I turned to — what thinkest 'on — to Tushery, by the mass. Ay, friend, a whole tale of tushery. And every tusher tushes me so free that may I be tushed if the whole thing is worth a tush. The Black Arrow : A Tale of Tunstall Forest is his name : tush, a poor thing.' * Tushery ' was his word (or Henley's) for the style of novel in Old English dialect such as ' Ivanhoe/ To Henley he sent at the same time ' A Jape of Tusherie/ two verses of which are : The Birds among the Bushes May wanton on the spray, But vain for him who tushes The brightness of the day ! And when at length he pushes Beyond the river dark — 'Las to the man who tushes ! ' Tush ' shall be God's remark. 34 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Still, as he wrote to Marcel Schwob, who wished to translate the story into French : ' I had indeed one moment of pride about my poor Black Arrow — Dickon Crookback I did, and I do, think a spirited and possible figure.' But the story during its appearance from June 30 to October 20, 1883, proved more popular than the previous serial by ' Captain George North,' and raised the circulation of ' Young Folks ' by many hundreds a week. Its readers were not searching critics, and none probably discerned any flaw of construction which may have arisen from the fact that R. L. S., in moving about the South of France whilst proofs were coming to him, failed to receive some, and, as he declared in later days, forgot w^hat had happened to several of his principal characters. No doubt The Black Arrow would never have been written had the occasion com.e a few months later, for Treasure Island, issued as a book in December 1883, brought Stevenson at once to notice as a coming writer whose work could not be bought at a price little more than that of a penny-a-liner's. Yet in 1888 he sanctioned its issue as a book by Messrs. Cassell, from whose press new editions have appeared with yearly or greater frequency ever since. Boy readers would not share Stevenson's regret in writing to Mr. William Archer in reference to his young son's fondness for The Black Arrow : ' I am sorry indeed to hear that my esteemed correspondent Tomarcher has such poor taste in literature. I fear he cannot have inherited this trait from his dear papa. Indeed I may say I know it, for I remember A BOOK OF R. L. S. 35 the energy of papa's disapproval when the work passed through his hands on its way to a second birth, which none regrets more than myself. It is an odd fact, or perhaps a very natural one : I find few greater pleasures than reading my own works, but I never, oh I never, read The Black Arrow' His wife, as we are told, found it the only one of his books which she could not read, whence Stevenson's touch of humour in dedicating the volume to her. The original five-shilling edition of 324 pages is valued at about fifteen shillings. BLACK, MARGARET MOYES Author of the volume * Robert Louis Stevenson ' (Oliphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1898) in the firm's * Famous Scots ' series. Two of the biographical chapters are interesting as a first-hand impression of R. L. S. at nineteen, by one who was intimate in his family's circle. Other details of his life are not always correctly stated, and the literary criticism is merely that of a not very discerning reader. BLACK CANYON, OR WILD ADVENTURES IN THE FAR WEST See ' Davos Press.' BODY SNATCHER, THE As horrible a tale as any of Stevenson's ; and, on its writing (with others of the same character) at Pitlochry in 1881, was ' laid aside in a justifiable disgust.' It is inferior to his other stories of the 36 A BOOK OF R. L. S. supernatural, and is not included in the Edinburgh edition. Nevertheless, the fabric of the tale is taken from Edinburgh legends of the early nineteenth century and, as Mr. Watt points out in his ' R. L. S.,' the professor designated as K is plainly the Scots anatomist Robert Knox who died in 1862. The story is chiefly remarkable for the gruesome measures taken to advertise it. Stevenson rather rashly accepted an offer to write at short notice a ghost story for a special Christmas number of the * Pall Mall Gazette.' Failing to satisfy himself, he offered Markheim, and that being found too short he finished off the discarded Body Snatcher, which was announced in the streets of London by sandwich men, wearing skulls, coffin lids, and grave-clothes. This display, it would seem, was stopped by the police, and the tale itself was not republished with any other of his writings until the issue of Tales and Fantasies after his death. The shilling ' Pall Mall Supplement ' of 1884, in which it first appeared, illustrated and in orange wrappers, is scarce, and has a value (first ed.) of about 25s. BOOKMAN STEVENSON NUMBER A miscellany of articles, verses, portraits, and illustrations issued as a ' Bookman Extra ' in 1913 must be remarked as a notable piece of Stevensonian literature. In addition to some original contri- butions, critical and biographical, it contains Mr Edmund Gosse's poem portrait from ' Firdausi in Exile,' and his salutation to Tusitala, which forms the dedication to ' In Russet and Silver.' In par- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 37 ticular the many drawings and photographs provide as complete a pictorial record of the scenes and people of Stevenson's life as is to be found in any single book. BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED ME This paper, written for a series of Kterary auto- biographical sketches, to which eminent men of the day contributed, appeared in ' The British Weekly/ May 13, 1887, when Stevenson was thirty- seven, and is reprinted in The Art of Writing. The dozen writers here selected for mention, Walt Whit- man, Herbert Spencer, Lewes (Goethe's Life), Marcus AureHus, Thoreau, Hazhtt, Meredith, and Wordsworth, are those who, as is shown by other confessions, had a share in moulding Stevenson's thoughts of life during the period from his twentieth to his twenty-fifth year, when he found himself most actively challenging accepted views of belief and conduct. BOTTLE IMP, THE This story, written soon after Stevenson first reached Samoa in December 1889 [cet. 39), has the distinction of being the first serial tale to be pub- lished in the Samoan language. It appeared the following year in a magazine ' O le Salu Samoa ' of the London Missionary Society. A photographic reproduction of the opening chapter is contained in Mr. Moors's ' With Stevenson in Samoa.' The making up of a story without a foundation in fact not entering into the Samoan imagination, the pros- 38 A BOOK OF R. L. S. perity of the Vailima family was commonly thought by the natives to come from the Bottle Imp, and the safe which stood in one corner of the wall upon the ground floor was believed to be its place of keep- ing. Writing to Sir Conan Doyle, R. L. S. tells how ' parties who come up to visit my unpreten- tious mansion, after having admired the ceilings by Vanderputty and the tapestry by Gobbling, mani- fest towards the end a certain uneasiness, which proves them to be fellows of an infinite delicacy. They may be seen to shrug a brown shoulder, and to roll up a speaking eye, and at last the secret bursts from them: "Where is the bottle?"' As in other cases Stevenson anticipated the later judg- ments of the critics in thinking the story ' one of my best works and ill to equal.' The play from which the idea was taken cannot be identified with its author, a playwright named Oliver Smith (1766- 1845), but a melodrama of the same name was per- formed at the Lyceum Theatre, London, on July 7, 1828. The Bottle Imp first appeared in ' Black and White,' March 28 and April 4, 1891, and is placed in Island Nights Entertainments. A film version of it by the Lasky Company, shown in London in 1917, was produced on the Hawaiian coast, which forms the setting for most of the story. BOURNEMOUTH Returning to England with his wife from Hyeres in July 1884, after a series of illnesses, one of which at Nice was nearly fatal, R. L. S. made his home at Bournemouth for nearly three years, from Sep- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 39 tember 1884 to August 1887 (cBt. 34 to 37). It was the only time he Hved in England and, except for the four years of his life in Samoa, the only period when his wife and he had their own house. The first two or three months were spent in rooms in a house (Wensleydale) on the West Giff, then a move was made to a furnished house in Branksome Park, named Bonallie Towers, and in April 1885 they made their home in a house which Thomas Stevenson bought and gave to his daughter-in-law. It is 61 Alum Chine Road, on the edge of Alum Chine, and still (191 9) bears the name Skerry vo re, which the Stevensons gave it in memory of the lighthouse off Tiree built by Louis' uncle Alan thirty years before. The character of the house, though not of the pleasantly wild garden which stretches down the slope of the Chine, is well shown in an admirable etching by Mr. Leshe M. Ward of Bournemouth, re- produced in the ' Bookman ' Stevenson number of 1913. From the roadway can be seen the tomb- stones to his two dogs, Coolin and Bogue, which Stevenson placed on the wall of the entrance w^ay. For nearly the whole of the three years he was not well enough to be out of doors, spent much of his time in bed, and often was too ill to see friends who came down from London. But he wrote Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his part of More New Arabian Nights, several of the essays and short stories and two of the plays in collaboration with Henley. These works, particularly Jekyll, had consummated his reputation as a writer. A wider public had re- cognized the deeper element in the author of Treasure 40 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Island, and critics acknowledged a new figure in literature. Nevertheless his receipts from his writ- ings during this period did not average more than £300 to £400 a year. The autumn and winter of 1886 were spent by his parents in Bournemouth. The elder Stevenson, whose health w^as failing, wished to be near his son, and was glad to show his pleasure in the now general recognition of Louis as a man of letters. But the father's condition becoming serious, he returned to Edinburgh, was followed by Louis, and died on May 8, 1887. The event released Stevenson from his obligation to remain in England. On the doctors' advice, and for reasons of his wife's as- sociations, he decided to seek health in northern America. On August 20, he left Bournemouth, stayed for a day in London, and the next morning embarked for New York, never to return. BRECK, ALAN Much less is known of the redoubtable Stewart rebel who fights and talks and hides through the pages of Kidnapped and Catriona than of the MacGregors and lawyers who are Stevenson's other historical characters. The Appin murder (q.v), of which Alan undoubtedly knew the secret, has singled him out from the rank and file of Highlanders who Hved by their wits before and after the '45. In- asmuch as the trial of James of the Glen rested on his guilty connivance with Alan, who was charged as principal, the meagre facts of Alan's career were A BOOK OF R. L. S. 41 recited by both sides, and differently interpreted by counsel for and against the accused. They were no more than that Alan's father, one Donald Stewart of Rannoch, on his death had entrusted his young children to the care of James, who was a distant kinsman of his ; that young Alan throughout a tur- bulent youth owed much to his guardian, with whom, after the Rebellion, he was on terms of close friendship. Alan had been in the army before the '45, but had been taken prisoner by the Prince's forces at Prestonpans, and thenceforth was an ardent Jacobite. He made his escape to France, where he had enlisted in a Scots battahon of Louis xiv. The Highlands were then a recruiting ground for the French service. Alan was accustomed to revisit his own country of Appin for the purpose of enlisting Highlanders in the Stewart cause, and for collecting from the tenants of his exiled chief Stewart of Ard- shiel the rents — or part of them — which they con- tinued to pay to the head of their clan, as well as to the British Government by whom the rebel estates had been confiscated. Outlaws such as he were permitted to move about fairly freely so long as they behaved themselves, and it was on one of these visits that Alan, by his presence in the neighbour- hood on the day of the murder, brought disaster upon his former guardian. These details make up the historical Alan up to this time, except that his name of Breck came from his disfigurement from small-pox, and that his appearance tallied with the description in the ' papers ' for his arrest which is quoted in Kidnapped. The Alan of the book, his 42 A BOOK OF R. L. S. conceit, craft, and volubility, are purely Stevenson's creation. He made his escape to France after the murder. According to an anonymous letter, probably written by James More (q.v.), he landed there in March 1753, and was at Lille in Ogilvy's regiment. The treacher- ous father of Catriona had designs on him. There is a letter among the * Newcastle Papers,' signed by James Drummond, offering to bring Alan Breck to England on condition of an appointment in the Government service. If tradition be true Alan was more than a match for his would-be kidnapper, and though James escaped with his life the fiery Stewart made off with his property. Here we lose sight of him, but Sir Walter Scott in the Appendix to ' Rob Roy ' tells that he was living in Paris during the Revolution. About 1789 a friend of Scott's was invited to view a procession from the windows of a room occupied by a Scottish Benedictine priest, and there found sitting by the fire a tall, thin, raw- boned, grim-looking old man, wearing a military decoration. The talk turning on the streets of Paris, the old soldier exclaimed with a sigh and a sharp Highland accent : ' Deil ane o' them is worth the Hie Street of Edinburgh.' It is the last picture of Alan Breck Stewart, then quietly ending his days on a modest pension. BROWN, HORATIO ROBERT FORBES (1854- ) The close friend and biographer of J. A. S3'monds [q.v.) was a frequent visitor to Davos, and thus came to know Stevenson during the two winters when the A BOOK OF R. L. S. 43 latter received a measure of solace in his exile in the Alps from the society of Symonds. At the ends of these visits Mr. Brown would re-cross the Alps to his home in Venice, where he has spent a lifetime in literature, and has written his ' Life on the Lagoons,' and his many studies of Venetian history. The Letters show the altogether familiar relations between them ; Stevenson sent to Mr. Brown a prized book, Penn's ' Fruits of Solitude,' at the same time admitting that it cost him a wrench to part with it. BUCKLAND, JACK One of Stevenson's fellow passengers in the ' Janet Nicoll,' by which he made the last of his Pacific cruises, and one of the trio (all of that voyage) to whom Island Nights Entertainments is dedicated. Buckland is the original of Tommy Hadden in The Wrecker. Mr. Moors speaks of him as a devil-may- care wanderer who met a tragic death, being blown to atoms by the explosion of a pow^der magazine in Suwarrow Island. BURLINGAME, E. L. (1848- ) Editor of ' Scribner's Magazine ' from 1886 to 1914, and from the time of Stevenson's second arrival in America in 1887, constantly in corre- spondence with him in matters connected with the publication of books and articles. With the excep- tion of certain work which was the subject of con- tract with the McClure firm, Stevenson's writings 44 A BOOK OF R. L. S. appeared in America with Messrs. Scribner. Many of his letters to Mr. Burhngame from Samoa contain orders for newly published books to be supplied to him by Scribner's and are thus something of an index to his reading of modern literature during the last few years of his life. BURNS, ROBERT, SOME ASPECTS OF The essay which was published in the ' Cornhill Magazine/ October 1879, and is placed in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, is not the first which Stevenson wrote on Burns. Two years previously he had been commissioned to write the article on Burns in the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' and had had his manuscript declined for the reason, as Sir Sidney Colvin has said, that it ' was thought to convey a view of the poet too frankly critical, and too little in accordance with the accepted Scotch tradition.' The second essay, which, it may be judged, is not very different, in its note of severity, from the first, has provoked resentment in the breasts of Scotsmen for its plain speaking of Burns's lapses from the moral life. Sir Sidney Colvin is disposed to consider the disapproval of it of Mr. Alexander Macmillan to have been the cause of Stevenson's ceasing to contribute to the firm's magazine. And in one of the earliest of the many books of the Rt. Hon. J. M. Robertson, * New Essays Towards a Critical Method' (1897), there is an echo of the Scottish sensitiveness to this outspoken paper on the national idol. In an essay on ' Stevenson and Burns ' Mr. Robertson takes R. L. S. to task for A BOOK OF R. L. S. 45 labelling Burns a Don Juan, and defends the poet against the charge of idleness in his later years. Yet Stevenson stood by his study during the three years which elapsed before including it in Familiar Studies where, in the prefatory notes, he has a bare word of apology to say. Writing it, he judged it * long, dry, unsympathetic, but sound ' ; when published, * one of my high-water marks.' A glimpse of the paper in the writing, afforded in a letter to Mr Edm.und Gosse, marks the different respects in which the genius and defects of char- acter of Burns affected Stevenson : * I made a kind of chronological table of his various loves and lusts, and have been comparatively speechless ever since. I am sorry to say it, but there was something in him of the vulgar, bagmanlike, professional seducer. Oblige me by taking down and reading, for the hundredth time I hope, his " Twa Dogs " and his " Address to the Unco Guid," I am only a Scotchman after all, you see ; and when I have beaten Burns, I am driven at once, by my parental feelings, to console him with a sugar-plum. But hang me if I know anything I like so well as the " Twa Dogs." Even a common Englishman may have a glimpse, as it were from Pisgah, of its extraordinary merits.' CAMPBELL, LEWIS (1830-1908) The eminent professor of Greek at St. Andrews, and translator and investigator of Plato and Sophocles was one of Stevenson's sponsors in the application for the professorship of literature at Edinburgh, The one letter to him from Stevenson, 46 A BOOK OF R. L. S. which is pubUshed, is an unquahfied eulogy of Campbell's classical writings. CANOE SPEAKS, THE The poem which is III of Underwoods is evidently a product of An Inland Voyage. Its abrupt ending is not due to its having been unfinished, but the remaining portion, since included in New Poems and Variant Readings, with the title, ' Now bare to the Beholder's Eye,' continues the theme of the dis- turbed bathing girls in a vein of realism still not quite acceptable to English taste. CATRIONA The sequel to Kidnapped, written after an interval of six years, marks, as is pointed out in the chapter on the former work, a notable development of Stevenson's powers. In Kidnapped the Appin murder {q.v.) is a mere ghmpse ; in Catriona the story is deeply involved with the trial which followed it and with the personages which figured in this piece of the aftermath of the '45 in the Highlands. It is historical in a much larger measure and closer relation than the tale of which it is the continuation ; and though the two have been issued as one book, The Adventures of David Balfour, it depends so much less on the element of excitement, and so much more on its drawings of people, that the two scarcely make a homogeneous work. Like Kidnapped it was written within a short time (February to May 1892) at Vailima, when Stevenson {cBt. 42) was A BOOK OF R. L. S. 47 busy also with his work on Samoan politics, issued as A Footnote to History. Even so he was chafing at his slowness and his want of Scott's power which turned out ' Guy Mannering ' in three weeks : ' It makes me sick of myself to make such a fash and bobbery over a rotten end of an old nursery yarn not worth spitting on when done.' Actually he thought then that it and The Beach of Falesa ' seem to me to be nearer what I mean than anything I have ever done ; nearer what I mean by fiction ; the nearest thing before was Kidnapped.' And a year later he was anticipating the critics in esteem- ing the work for its characterization : ' One thing is sure, there has been no such drawing of Scots character since Scott ; and even he never drew a full-length like Davie with his shrewdness and sim- plicity and stockishness and charm. Yet you '11 see the public won't want it : they want more Alan.' Perhaps it is necessary to be a Scot to en- dorse this view of David, and certainly it is to share Stevenson's delight in the boguey story of Tod Lapraik, introduced into Catriona : ' A piece of living Scots,' he wrote, * if I had never writ anything else but that and Thrawn Janet, still I 'd have been a writer.' Of the real people in the book Grant of Preston- grange, Simon Fraser, James More, and Alan Breck are the subject of separate chapters. The others play smaller parts, and may be taken together. In finding a kinsman for David in Mr. Balfour of Pilrig, Stevenson appropriated an ancestor of his own, James Balfour, his great-great-grandfather 48 A BOOK OF R. L. S. on his mother's side, born in 1705, and a man of some note in his day as Professor of Moral Philo- sophy in the University of Edinburgh. The Duke of Argyll, the predominant personage in the Appin trial, is shown in but two glimpses, fixing the travel-stained David ' with an arrogant eye ' from his place in church, and passing sentence on James Stewart. It is characteristic of Stevenson that he touches so briefly upon the central incident of the story. He is content to compress the trial into the sentence * James was as fairly murdered as though the Duke had got a fowhng-piece and stalked him,' and to find his material in the by-issues. The Argyll who, as head of the Clan Campbell, thus directed the political murder of James was Archibald, third duke, a Whig in politics, and for many years before his accession to the title in 1843 the greatest political personage in Scotland. He was Lord Justice-General by virtue of his rank, although, as it happened, he had had some training in law. His part in the Appin trial shows the feudal power of the chieftain, which nominally received its death-blow after the '45, none the less in active operation. By the Heritable Jurisdictions Act of 1747 Argyll lost the right (apart from his judicial ofhce) to try and condemn to death within the Campbell territory, and was compensated therefor by the payment of £20,000. Yet if the feudal power had gone, there remained, by assent of the British Govern- ment, a legal and political power not very easy to distinguish from it in its opportunities for vengeance. I A BOOK OF R.L. S. 49 The prisoner's advocates, whom Stevenson re- presents as seeking to exploit the case to their own advancement, are not made to reflect a very favour- able hght on the Scottish Bar of the period. R. L. S. draws a personal picture of only one of them, Sheriff Miller, who afterwards rose high in his pro- fession as Sohcitor-General, Lord Advocate, Lord Justice-Clerk, and Lord President of the Court of Session. In contrast with the lawyers who fill a great part of the stage in Catriona, is the imaginary character of the Lord Advocate's daughter, Barbara Grant, perhaps the most successful of Stevenson's not very numerous feminine creations, at any rate one which gave him more pleasure than most. Miss Grant's vivacious archness obtains an added interest from the opinion of ' One who knew him,' writing in the ' Westminster Budget,' soon after Stevenson's death, that it disclosed more of the real Stevenson than any of his male characters. ' His was just that quahty of wit, that fine manner and great gentleness under a surface of poUshed raillery.' Barbara's brilliant qualities in fact rather overshadow the name character of the book. Catriona, whom history does not identify among the dozen odd children of James More, lives as a study of the High- land character in a woman, brave, ' touchy,' and on occasion sullen, a real person, if not the conven- tional heroine of a romantic tale. Her share in her father's escape from jail had its counterpart in real life, though we are denied the name of the daughter who thus enabled James More to prosecute his 50 A BOOK OF R. L. S. double dealings. And there is the view (which Stevenson takes in the book) that the adventure was managed by the Government. For that, there is confirmation in a fact which Andrew Lang's re- searches among Jacobite papers have brought to light, viz., that after the arrest of James More on the abduction charge the suggestion was made in government circles that he should be allowed to escape by giving order to that effect to his escort. There is therefore ground for supposing that the escape wittily reported to the Lord Advocate by his daughter was really planned by Prestongrange, and that Catriona was led unknowingly to serve the purpose of the Government. We are here in the dark places of an ti- Jacobite intrigue, but it looks as though R. L. S. was right in his guess. The case of Lady Grange, with which the incar- ceration of David on the Bass is compared, is an un- pleasant scandal, which had not then been forgotten. She was the unw^anted wife of the judge Lord Grange, a kindred spirit and boon companion of the notorious Simon Fraser, who was the leading partner in the plot by which she was carried off to an island of the Hebrides, and there kept for many years until her death. Catriona first appeared in ' Atalanta,' January to May, 1893, under the title David Balfour, the name by which it is still known in America. The first Enghsh edition, issued by Messrs. Cassell in 1893, and containing a brief account of David's adventures in Kidnapped, is worth about 15s. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 51 CELESTIAL SURGEON, THE The short poem which expresses Stevenson's practical philosophy of life perhaps more plainly than any other passage in his writings is attributed to the year 1882 [cet. 32), which began with invahdism at Davos and ended badly at Marseilles with the first of the series of illnesses, the prelude to the in- door years at Bournemouth. The lines, No. XXIL of Underwoods, mark a brighter and altogether more individual development of the ' Address to his Soul ' of two years earher, written in California. This is No. XXIV. of Underwoods, and was the first work of Stevenson's in verse to be published, viz., in the ' Atlantic Monthly,' October 1880. CHARLES OF ORLEANS The paper on the French ducal poet of the fifteenth century, which is perhaps the roundest and most complete of the portraits collected in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, occupied Stevenson during the latter part of 1875 and the summer of 1876 {cBt. 25), when he was much engrossed with the French hterature of the period, and proposed other essays on Joan of Arc, Louis xi., and Rene of Anjou. The paper, after its appearance in the ' Comhill Magazine,' December 1876, comes in for less censure than the other pieces in the self-critical notes with which R. L. S. prefaced them when preparing them for book publication. 52 A BOOK OF R. L. S. CHALMERS, STEPHEN (1880- ) Author of several Stevenson little books, published by the Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, U.S.A. * The Penny Piper of Saranac ' (1916) is a sketch of Stevenson's life at Saranac Lake, in the winter of 1887-8. It contains a photograph of the memorial tablet to Stevenson, placed by the American Steven- son Society in the cottage where he stayed. * The Beloved Physician, Edward Livingston Trudeau,' is a monograph on Stevenson's doctor at Saranac, himself a victim of tuberculosis twenty-seven years afterwards. ' Enchanted Cigarettes ' is the fantastic title (borrowed from Balzac) of a booklet on the books which Stevenson planned but did not finish. CHARACTER, A This fragment, written in 1870-1 {cBt. 20-21), is a sketch of the lowest depths of life uncommon in those of Stevenson's early writings which have been preserved, and of interest in exhibiting a direction of his art which reached its highest expression in Mr. Hyde. First published in the Edinburgh edition, it is now included in the volume Lay Morals. CHARTIY, BAZAAR, THE The triiie of dialogue designed to amuse the visitors at a sale for charity and privately printed for the purpose was written when Stevenson was about eighteen. It was not republished until included in the Edinburgh edition, and is not included in any current volume. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 53 CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES, A From his youth Stevenson was an inveterate writer of impromptu rhymes for his own and his friends' amusement. The specimens scattered in his letters up to about 1887 witness his enjoyment of these exercises, entered upon now out of high spirits, now as a rehef in sickness. To these same motives may be set down the pieces of verse which in serious intention came spasmodically from his pen during these early years. Most of them are short and very few were published at the time. While conscious of his growing power as a writer of prose, Stevenson was a good critic of his gifts as a poet. * I am a weak brother in verse,' he wrote to Henley in 1879 apropos the latter 's criticism of * Our Lady of the Snows.' ' You ask me to re-write things that I have already managed just to write with the skin of my teeth. If I don't re-write them, it 's because I don't see how to write them better, not because I don't think they should be.' Thus it came about, from Stevenson's own diffidence and through the soHcitous care of his friends, scarcely any verse of his was allowed to appear until, with some anxiety for its reception, the Child's Garden was issued in 1885 [cBt. 35). The idea of the verses, the presentation to grown- up people of the thoughts and feelings of children, which has given enduring life to them, was perhaps not deliberately contemplated by Stevenson, but none the less was original with him or at any rate had never before been carried out in such perfect form. Most of us soon forget how things appeared 54 A BOOK OF R. L. S. to us when we were little : Stevenson, as he often declared, retained the liveliest conception of his own thoughts and fancies when a child at the serious business of play. Thus the Verses are a page of autobiography ; some of them so definitely so that old playfellows wrote of their pleasure at the pictures. They recall his days— and nights— as a rather lonely and ailing child in his Edinburgh home, and the times which, when he was a httle older and stronger but still dehcate, he spent with one and another of his many cousins at his grand- father's manse at Colinton. The situation of the manse on the close-wooded banks of the Water of Leith made the garden and the near surroundings a rare domain for endless make-beheve adventures in which little Louis was the ringleader of his older cousins, exhausting his frail body in * a fury of play ' at pirates, shipwreck and soldiering. How genuinely these games inspired the verses in A Child's Garden may be seen from a letter to a favourite cousin (Mrs. Milne) who had recognized herself as one of the three in the ' Pirate Story.' After twenty-five years R. L. S. writes : * You were sailing under the title of Princess Royal : I, after a furious contest, under that of Prince Alfred ; and Willie, still a little sulky, as the Prince of Wales. We were all in a buck basket about half-way between the swing and the gate ; and I can still see the Pirate Squadron heave in sight upon the weather bow.' The children's verses were written at irregular intervals from 1881 to 1884 {cBt. 31 to 34). Accord- ing to his biographer th^ suggestion of them came A BOOK OF R. L. S. 55 from a * Birthday Book for Children/ containing verses of Mrs. Sales Barker to Miss Kate Greenaway's drawings, which his mother had with her during a stay at Braemar with Stevenson and his family. A nucleus of the collection was formed in the course of this summer in the Highlands ; the greater number were written afterwards at odd times during the next three years, some at Hyeres with his left hand and in semi-darkness when recovering from haemorrhage and ophthalmia. Title upon title for the proposed volume came from Stevenson. * Penny Whistles — for Small Whistlers ' was an early choice, and the name under which a set of proof sheets (the rarest of Stevensoniana) was printed, and privately circulated. Henley's copy was sold at the Red Cross Sale of April 25, 1918, for £300. Illustrations were also planned and profuse suggestions made for them but in the end they were abandoned. The elaboration of these measures to put the verses into the most pleasing dress reflects the doubts of them which exercised Stevenson and those of his circle. As Mr. Edmund Gosse has recorded : * his friends were as timid as hens about this new experiment of their duckling's ' ; and to him, while proofs were being passed for the press, R. L. S. wrote what he thought of them in a passage which, while showing this apprehension, states in a word the essential quality for which the verses are beloved : ' They look ghastly in the cold light of print ; but there is something nice in the little ragged regiment for all ; the blackguards seem to me to smile, to have a kind of childish treble note that 56 A BOOK OF R. L. S. sounds in my ears freshly ; not song, if you will, but a child's voice.' The dedication of A Child's Garden to his nurse, Alison Cunningham [q.v.), is perhaps the happiest and most happily worded of Stevenson's many famihar talks with his friends issued in this guise. It needs no postscript, but a letter to Cummy telling her of it shows how sincerely it was meant : ' This little book, which is all about my childhood, should indeed go to no other person but you who did so much to make that childhood happy.' The insight into the mind of himself when a child which is displayed in the verses makes it natural to ask what was the grown-up Stevenson's attitude to children. His letters, a revelation of his personahty in a host of phases, give no answer except an implied negative ; save for his play with a httle Russian child of two and a half at Mentone when he was twenty- three, the doings of children figure not at all in his talk. The fact seems to be that egoist as he was in many respects, Stevenson was one also in this ; he dwelt in vivid memory upon his own childhood and he interpreted children largely in terms of these recollections. On the other side must be set his own physical inability for the greater part of his adult life to share in the play of children or even to be much in their society. His marriage, in giving him a stepson of twelve, but no child of his o^\^l, was not the occasion of altogether new thoughts of children as it is in the lives of many men. Yet, as we have it in the judgment of Mr Edmund Gosse, who saw much of R. L. S. in the years immediately A BOOK OF R. L. S. 57 before and after his marriage, the coming of his stepson broadened his view of children : * He began to see in them all variations of this intelligent and sympathetic little stepson of his own.' A Child's Garden was published by Messrs. Longmans in March 1885 at 5s., which original edition (of loi pages) has now a value of about ^fio. CHILD'S PLAY The outlook of a child upon his games which this paper presents for the education of grown-up people, is unmistakably that which Stevenson preserved as a vivid recollection of his very young days. For him the essence of play was make-believe ; lacking which, games hke cricket and football were not play at all. Though he played football when at school at Isleworth he had, as he says, * to spirit himself up . . . with an elaborate story of enchantment, and take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in conflict between two Arabian nations.' Steven- son's play was of the kind pictured in The Lantern Bearers and A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, and a sharer of it for a whole winter when R. L. S. was about sixteen was his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, referred to in the passage of the essay which de- scribes their romantic device for enlivening the con- sumption of porridge. The two lived, as Stevenson wrote, ' in a purely visionary state, and were never tired of dressing up.' And there is their invention recorded by his biographer of the rival kingdoms of Encyclopaedia and Nosingtonia of which R. L. S. and his cousin were the respective monarchs. It 58 A BOOK OF R. L. S. was childhood such as this, passed in an orgy of romantic imagination, that Stevenson has in his mind in his analysis of motives by which children are ruled. The essay, which appeared in the * Cornhill Maga- zine ' of September 1878 (cet. 28), is included in Virginibus Puerisque. CHRISTMAS AT SEA See ' Ballads.' CHRISTMAS SERMON, A No other paper perhaps so well represents Steven- son's broad and positive conception of goodness as this essay, which completed the twelve contributed to ' Scribner's Magazine ' during 1888 (cet. 38). Certainly none more strongly expresses his aversion from the presentation of morality as the abstinence from things held to be wrong. If such abstinence be necessary to the positive goodness of kindness or honesty they should be concealed like vices. That happiness is a virtue in itself, to be striven for, not expected as a reward of virtue, is a theme of this paper which is expressed in The Celestial Surgeon written six years before : If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness ; If I have moved among my race And shown no glorious morning face. . . . A Christmas Sermon is placed in the works, as at present issued, in Across the Plains, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 59 COCKERMOUTH AND KESWICK This unfinished chapter on a visit to Cumberland in 1871 [cet. 21), and the first travel paper of Steven- son's, marks the bent of his mind in several respects which are more sharply delineated in later work of the same kind. One such is his aversion from travel- hng by the stereotyped routes of the sightseer ; another, his sense of strangeness in England, after- wards elaborated in The Foreigner at Home. The practice of making no notes on excursions of this kind, which in this paper he declares to be a necessity for a picturesque chronicle, was one which Stevenson had abandoned a few years afterwards. The wTiting of a daily journal from which such books as An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey were afterwards written became his regular habit until the last few years of his life. First published in the Edinburgh edition, the present paper is now included in Essays of Travel. COLLEGE MAGAZINE, A The much-quoted paper which tells of Stevenson's self-training to be a writer, and of the brief career of the ' Edinburgh University Magazine,' in which his maiden efforts obtained semi-private publication, was first published in Memories and Portraits, and may therefore be thought to be work of his thirty- seventh year. At any rate the sketch of the life and character of Robert Glasgow Brown could not very well have been written until after the latter's death in 1878. The newspaper, launched b}^ Brown, and * in which young gentlemen from the Universities 6o A BOOK OF R. L. S. are encouraged, at so much a line, to garble facts, insult foreign nations, and calumniate private in- dividuals ' was ' London,' edited by Henley on its founder's decline in health. For it Stevenson wrote many miscellaneous contributions, most of which have not been reprinted ; and New Arabian Nights first appeared in its pages. The reminiscences of his early friends in this paper contain also the only hint in Stevenson's essays of any youthful passion. Even so it was tepid enough — the sending of a copy of the University Magazine to ' the lady with whom my heart was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it.' COLLEGE MEMORIES, SOME In the piece of autobiography written when he was thirty-six R. L. S. shows himself still the college youth, ready to talk of his ' rational system of truantry,' dwelling with gusto upon the facts gathered outside the college courses, and recalling that * none ever had more certificates for less education.' The paper, which was written for the * New Amphion,' the book of the Edinburgh Univer- sity Union Fancy Fair, December 1886, is included in Memories and Portraits. COLVIN, LADY See ' Mrs. Sitwell.' COLVIN, SIR SIDNEY (1845- ) The chief of Stevenson's friends, in the closeness of their intimacy, was five years his senior. Chance A BOOK OF R. L. S. 6i brought them together when R. L. S. was twenty- three, and Sir Sidney then, and for the following twelve years, Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cam- bridge University. The meeting was of great conse- quence for Stevenson, +o whom the choice between a literary career and some ordinary profession or business presented itself as the result of differences between himself and his parents on what he had even then long regarded as the project of his hfe. Rehef in these difficulties came from the sympathy and encouragement of two fellow visitors at the Suffolk home of a cousin of his. These were the present Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin, the latter then Mrs. Sitwell, a letter to whom not long after their first meeting marks the deference to the judgment of his future literary executor and editor which Steven- son displayed to the end of his life : ' If Colvin does not think I shall be able to support myself soon by Hterature, I shall give it up and go (horrible as the thought is to me) into an office of some sort.' The help thus given at the outset of his literary Hfe was continued in many ways ; by introductions to friends and editors in London ; by candid criticism, and by reconciling the divergence of views between R. L. S. and his parents, in short, by an interest which is rarely shown by one literary man in the work of another. There is Stevenson's warm ac- knowledgment of this early encouragement in a letter from Honolulu : ' My dear Colvin, I owe you and Fleeming Jenkin, the two older men who took the trouble and knew how to make a friend of me, everything that I have and am.' On Sir Sidney's 62 A BOOK OF R.L. S. appointment as Keeper of the Prints and Drawings in the British Museum in 1884 his rooms in the Museum were Stevenson's headquarters in London. Previously, for a time, the two had shared a lodging in Hampstead. To their friendship we owe the personal account of Stevenson's doings in Samoa, written as a regular monthly letter for the purpose of keeping them in touch with each other. These and other letters were published under Sir Sidney Colvin's editorship as Vailima Letters (Methuen) in 1895, and (a further series) as Letters to his Family and Friends (Methuen) in 1899. The two series were then united into one and issued by Messrs. Methuen in 1911 as The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, volumes which, with their included bio- graphical chapters and editorial notes, are now the most complete picture of Stevenson's life and thoughts. The Edinburgh edition of Stevenson's collected works is the editorial work of Sir Sidney Colvin, by whom also the article on Stevenson in the ' Dictionary of National Biography ' is written. CORNFORD, L. COPE (1867- ) Author of ' Robert Louis Stevenson ' (London, Blackwood, 1889), a brief biography and Hterary study and, considered in the latter category, one of the most understanding analyses of Stevenson's art as a writer. CRABBED AGE AND YOUTH The plea and argument for at least as great a measure of consideration for the ways and thoughts A BOOK OF R.L. S. 63 of youth as for those of age belong to the series of papers written when Stevenson was about twenty- eight. Contrasting the copy-book maxims of caution and respectabihty with the doings of the world's acknowledged heroes, he denies the principle of accepting the views of age on life as final. He is a youth glorying in youthfulness, and in anticipation refusing to repent its imprudences. . When life is hurrying you at breakneck speed to the unknown it is folly to husband your energies in provision for an old age which may never come. Such is the note which sounds in one form or another in all Stevenson's lay sermons of this period. The paper was published in the ' Cornhill Magazine' of March 1878 and is placed in Virginihus Puerisque. CROCKETT, S. R. (1860-1914) As minister for some years of a parish in the Pent- land Hills S. R. Crockett was perhaps the friend of, and commentator on Stevenson most famihar with Stevenson's home country and the scenes of the Covenanters whose history was so large an influence on the thoughts of both of them. Their friendship began by Mr. Crockett writing to Saranac of a book he was sending, and by Stevenson, unable to make out his signature, replying to ' Dear Minister of the Free Church at Penicuik.' Thereafter they were regular correspondents, but the greater number of Stevenson's letters, written at intervals of two months, were most unfortunately lost by Mr. Crockett. The words of the dedication to him of *The Stickit Minister,' as Stevenson wrote, ' brought 64 A BOOK OF R. L. S. tears to my eyes every time I looked at them. " Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying. His heart remembers how." Ah, by God it does.' It was this dedication which provided Stevenson with the motif of the verses in reply ' To S. R. Crockett ' which are XLIII in Songs of Travel, of which the first is : Blows the wind to-day and the sun and the rain are flying, Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying My heart remembers how ! CRUSE, AMY Author of ' Robert Louis Stevenson ' (London, George Harrap & Co., 1905), a biography, con- cerning itself chiefly with the external events of Stevenson's life, and particularly those appropriate to the inclusion of the book in a series of lives of ' Heroes of All Times.' CUNNINGHAM, ALISON (CUMMY) (1822-1913) Stevenson's nurse from the time he was a baby of eighteen months. She came to the family when she was thirty, and for long after there was any need of her services remained the devoted friend and servant of Louis and his parents. The degree to which her unceasing care of ' her boy ' was esteemed is familiar from the letters of R. L. S. to her, dowTi to the last, written two months before his death. He never omitted to send Cummy an autographed A BOOK OF R. L. S. 65 copy of his works, as each appeared. His father, who hked Cummy for her strong theological bias, made provision for her when she left their house. His mother, on her return to Edinburgh from Vailima, was constantly soHcitous of Cummy's welfare and, after her death, Mrs. R. L. Stevenson added to her pension and from San Francisco wired m^essages of instruction for Cummy's comfort in her old age. In all this there was exactly the expression of gratitude to her which R. L. S. felt throughout his life, and declared, when he was twenty-one, in the letter : * Do not suppose that I shall ever forget those long, bitter nights, when I coughed and coughed, and was so unhappy, and you were so patient and loving with a poor sick child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish I might become a man worth talking of, if it were only that you should not have thrown away your pains. . . . My dear old nurse, and you know there is nothing a man can say nearer his heart except his mother or his wife — next time when the spring comes round, and everything is beginning once again, if you should happen to think that you might have had a child of your own, and that it was hard you should have spent so many years taking care of some one else's prodigal, just you think this — you have been for a great deal in my life ; you have made much that there is in me, just as surely as if you had conceived me ; and that there are sons who are more ungrateful to their own mothers than I am to you. For I am not ungrateful, my dear Cummy, and it is with a very sincere 66 A BOOK OF R. L. S. emotion that I write myself your little boy — Louis.' This was no mere form of words, for ' Cummy ' had a great influence on Stevenson's imagination and love of stories. She came from Torrybum on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, an isolated spot even now, and was full of the tales of smugglers, bodysnatchers, and bogles which were told of her native parish. Also she was a woman of stem religious convictions, read to him from her Presby- terian authors and introduced him to the Covenant- ing writers. To her, the theatre, novels, and cards were of the devil. There is the picture of the elder Stevensons playing a game of whist whilst Louis and his nurse prayed that it might not be visited upon them to their perdition. The Child's Garden of Verses was dedicated — ' To Alison Cunningham. From her Boy.' Before it was completed, R. L. S. was several times telling her of it, and that she was the only person who would really understand it. The nurse is not a common subject for the essayist or poet. Stevenson, by the dedication, as much as by the verses, showed how he never lost the clear sense of what it feels like to be a child. For some ^^ears after leaving the Stevenson house- hold, Miss Cunningham lived at Swanston as house- keeper to her brother. Her portrait, painted by Mr. Fiddes Watt of Edinburgh, is preserved at Swanston Cottage by Lord Guthrie. Afterwards she made her home with a cousin in Edinburgh, and was there constantly sought out by Stevensonians. She diedj aged ninety-one, in July 1913, and thus A BOOK OF R. L. S. 67 survived Stevenson for nearly nineteen years. A tribute to her memory is paid by Lord Guthrie in a Httle book, * Gummy/ which he has written (Edin- burgh, Otto Schulze, 1913). DAMIEN, FATHER An Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu. It is difficult to understand why Sir Walter Raleigh in his study of Stevenson should have called the letter in defence of Father Damien ' his only Hterary mistake.' A mistake in logic, in controversy, it may have been according to established rules, but unless it be held that righteous anger is to have no place in Hterature the critic's judgment of it falls to the ground. The hot haste in which it was written denied Stevenson the oppor- tunity of his habitual revision ; and it is thus a reve- lation of his raw power which no other of his writings affords. There is even much to be said for the line which he took in this white heat of indignation. To have admitted certain of Damien's failings, and to have repudiated others by a whirlwind of casti- gation of Dr. Hyde was plainly illogical, but it is inconceivable that a reasoned defence of the dead priest would have achieved one-thousandth part of the effect which the pubhc assault upon the Reverend Dr. Hyde produced. Instead of seeking to convince from evidence, Stevenson reversed the process, and let his caustic stream of wrath bespeak his own conviction. The general acceptance of the tract as a sweeping justification of Damien showed that his instinct had not misled him. 68 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Yet he was well informed of the facts in dispute which were then a matter of much talk in the Hawaiian islands. From Honolulu, where he had rested for six months at the end of his first Pacific cruise, he had made a trip to Molokai, and had spent a week in visiting the leper settlement. Damien had then been dead barely a month. The Flemish priest — he was trained in what was once Louvain — had voluntarily taken up his work there sixteen years before. For the last five years of his life he had been himself a leper. For all his devotion he was not popular in that hapless mixed company. Talk of him which was rife in the island and Honolulu made no plaster saint of him, and while he was still waiting the death he had courted, there were those who were ready to beheve the worst reports of him. Stevenson, as his wife has said, followed Damien's hfe * Hke a detective/ and he was clearly summing up the result of his inquiries in the letters he wrote to Sir Sidney Colvin on his return to Honolulu from the leper island : * Of old Damien, whose w^eaknesses and worse perhaps I heard fully, I think only the more. It was a European peasant : dirty, bigoted, untruthful, unwise, tricky, but superb with generosity, residual candour, and fundamental good-humour ; convince him he had done wrong (it might take hours of insult), and he would un- do what he had done, and like his corrector the better. A man with all the grime and paltriness of mankind, but a saint and hero all the more for that.' The circumstances in which the Letter was written A BOOK OF R. L. S. 69 have recently been recalled by Mrs. Stevenson in a preface to the 191 1 edition of Lay Morals. Coming to Samoa at the ending of their voyage on the * Equator/ they read in a newspaper that the pro- ject to erect a memorial to Damien was to be aban- doned owing to the publication of a letter by a Honolulu missionary, in which the priest's con- traction of leprosy was attributed to his immoral habits. Stevenson exclaimed that it (the letter) was ' too damnable for belief,' but he had the evi- dence of his own eyes two months afterwards in Sydney. There the " Sydney Presbyterian " of the previous October 26, by whom Dr. Hyde's notorious epistle was published, was among the first news- papers to come into his hand. Mrs. Stevenson records his ferocity of indignation, the ' leaping stride ' with which he paced the room, and the sound of a chair being drawn to the table and an ink- stand dragged into place, as there and then he sat down in the next room to write his reply. Within a few hours he called his wife and her son and daughter to hear it, and to discuss the vital con- sideration that in publishing a document so de- structive of its subject's reputation he was exposing himself — and them — to the consequences of an action for libel. He asked their assent to what he proposed to do ; without it he would not take the risk of the loss of their entire means. His family joining with him, a printer was hired to produce the pamphlet which the party themselves distributed by post. Although a publisher could not be found for it in March (1890), it appeared in the ' Australian 70 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Star ' of May 24, having previously been published in the Edinburgh ' Scots Observer/ of which Henley was then editor, and from which it passed into the European press, with the effect of instantaneously achieving its author's purpose. In Honolulu, on the other hand, it aroused some debate in which the issue was confused by the share which Stevenson had taken in Hawaiian politics. The reader can refer in this matter to Johnstone's * Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific,' in which will be found the official facts which Stevenson must have known, and might have cited in his defence of Damien. It contains also the text of Damien's own report on his work to the Hawaiian Board of Health, by which body, through its commissioner at Molokai, the innuendoes against Damien were completely disproved. Such documents, however, were not Stevenson's weapons ; nor yet over ordinary matters did he allow his anger to run to the extreme of bitterness displayed in the Letter. Easily angered, his nature rebelled against wounding the feelings even of anta- gonists, a feeling to which he soon afterwards con- fessed in the Damien affair : * It is always harsh- ness that one regrets. ... I regret also my letter to Dr. Hyde. Yes, I do ; I think it was barbarously harsh ; if I did it now I would defend Damien no less well and give less pain to those who are alive. . . . When I wrote the letter, I beUeved he (Dr. Hyde) would bring an action, in which case I knew I would be beggared. But as yet there has come no action : the injured Doctor has contented him- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 71 self up to now with the (truly innocuous) vengeance of calling me a * Bohemian Crank.' Prices paid for the original Sydney pamphlet, of which only twenty-five copies were printed, have ranged from £7 to ^^27. Another private edition also of 1890 on Japanese paper has sold for about £6. The first published edition, again of 1890, is that of Chatto & Windus, by whom the letter is now included in the volume Lay Morals, DAVOS PLATZ Stevenson spent two winters at Davos when it was a mountain village isolated at the head of the Prattigau valley, and very different from the resort of the present day. Lung trouble and great weak- ness drove him there in October 1880 on his return from America with his bride and stepson. They stayed at the Hotel Belvedere, where Stevenson's invalidism was somewhat relieved by the society of John Addington Symonds [q.v.). The papers on the life and climate of Davos belong to this visit, which ended in April 1881. In the following October it was again impossible to contemplate a winter in Scotland, and the family made their home at Davos again until the spring of 1882, this time in the Chalet am Stein or Chalet Buol, near to the Buol Hotel and to the Symonds 's house. His health benefited by this second stay, though the place had no attractions for him. Hours of play with armies of tin soldiers amused him and his young stepson, and the purchase of a toy printing-press led to the 72 A BOOK OF R. L. S. issue of the woodcuts and verses of The Davos Press {q.v.). DAVOS IN WINTER The four short papers, of which this was one, on the Alpine resort for invaUds, were almost the only work which Stevenson did during his first winter at Davos (cet. 30) . He never liked his surroundings, feeling that * a mountain valley, an Alpine winter, and an invalid's weakness make up among them a prison of the most effective kind.' The monotony of the landscape oppressed him — one valley exactly like another — and he resented the impossibility of escaping from the other visitors, confined, like him, to the same mountain roads. The fretful note of his paper was what perhaps he had in mind a year afterwards in writing that he had * discoursed upon it (Davos) rather sillily,' adding that * it has done me, in my two winters' exile, much good ; so much that I hope to leave it now for ever.' The paper appeared in the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' February 21, 1881, and is included in Essays of Travel. DAVOS PRESS, THE The amusement which Stevenson derived for himself and his young stepson from the cutting and printing of wooden printing plates was the origin of some of the most highly prized — and priced — of Stevensoniana. These are the small pamphlets, some of the woodcuts only, others, in which the im- pressions are accompanied by verses, which were issued as from the Davos Press. They were printed A BOOK OF R. L. S. 73 in the toy press of his stepson, then about thirteen, and their production served to provide some recrea- tion during the two winters, of 188 1 and 1882, which were spent at Davos. One or two of them, however, were afterwards ' pubhshed ' in Edinburgh. The titles of these httle pamphlets are : Not I, and other Poems ; Moral Emblems (two series) ; Black Canyon, or Wild Adventures in the Far West ; The Marguerite ; The Graver and the Pen ; Rob and Ben, or the Pirate and the Apothecary ; and Lord Nelson and the Tar, the two latter, incomplete sets of engravings. A very limited number of each could have been printed, so that the books are among the rarest of Stevenson pubhcations, as much as £20 having been paid for a copy of one of the smallest. Reproductions of a few of the woodcuts were first published in the * Studio ' Winter Number of 1896, where Mr. Joseph Pennell, in an article on Stevenson as an illustrator, discovers many admirable qualities in them. Suc- cessive complete editions of the collected works have included them, but they have not as yet been issued in more popular form. DAY AFTER TO-MORROW, THE Except for his writings on Samoan affairs the only occasion on which Stevenson took up a political subject was in the contribution of this paper to the ' Contemporary Review,' April 1887. His interest in politics had begun, as his biographer says, with the adoption of a settled life at Bournemouth three years previously, and was exhibited in a deep dislike of Gladstone's poHcy at home and abroad. The 74 A BOOK OF R. L. S. disorder in Ireland so affected him that a more than usually lawless attack on a farmer in County Kerry by a party of moonlighters, led him to conceive the plan of occupying the farm himself with his family as a public act of protest against the misgovemment of the country. The project, from which he was dissuaded with the utmost difficulty and which he would have carried out, but for the sudden and final illness of his father, may be said to mark Stevenson's impetuous attitude towards political problems. This one political paper (now published in Lay Morals), in which he seeks to forecast certain of the factors tending to disintegrate a socialistic state, does little to demonstrate his fitness for the part of political prophet. DEACON BRODIE The qualified measure of success which this melodrama of the double life obtained plainly pro- vided the encouragement for future collaboration with Henley in the same field. The story of the disreputable Edinburgh citizen of the eighteenth century, a respectable cabinetmaker by day, a housebreaker by night, was familiar to Stevenson from childhood. A cabinet made by the Deacon stood in his nursery ; at fifteen years of age he had written a play around the Deacon's twofold life, and in the Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes the Deacon * slinking from a magistrate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp ' had been singled out from the figures of the past. The play which he A BOOK OF R. L. S. 75 and Henley wrote together in London and Swanston, in the spring of 1879, had from the exigencies of stage production to depart from the facts of Brodie's end. A robbery at the Excise office led to Brodie's being betrayed by members of his gang. He escaped to Holland but was brought back, tried before Lord Braxfield, Stevenson's * Weir of Hermiston/ and hanged on October 2, 1788. The play was first produced at Pullan's Theatre of Varieties, Bradford, December 28, 1882, and was performed the following year at Her Majesty's Theatre, Aberdeen. It enjoyed a certain run in the North of England and Scotland. Stevenson himself witnessed it on its production in London at the Prince's (now Prince of Wales) Theatre, July 2, 1884, when the name part was acted by Henley's brother, E. J. Henley, and that of Captain Rivers by Brandon Thomas. It afterwards was toured with some success in America. DEBATING SOCIETIES A paper contributed [cet. 20) to the ' Edinburgh University Mazazine,' and now published in Lay Morals. The Speculative Society, by the proceedings of which these maxims of debate must have been prompted, was an old established body in Edin- burgh unconnected with the University, though it had quarters in its buildings. Stevenson became one of its thirty ordinary members early in his nineteenth year, and for five years found his chief intellectual exercise at its meetings. 76 A BOOK OF R. L. S. DEDICATIONS The felicitous greetings in public, uttered by way of dedication of his books, exhibit an aspect of Stevenson's charm as a writer undisplayed perhaps in any other. With one exception they were all addressed to close friends. Sir Walter Simpson to whom An Inland Voyage is dedicated was his com- panion, the ' Cigarette ' of the canoe journey. The dedication of Travels with a Donkey is to ' My dear Sidney Colvin ' and of Virgtnibus Puerisque, which followed it, to W. E. Henley, the latter ending in a hope of lifelong friendship not realized. His first work of more serious kind. Familiar Studies of Men and Books, was dedicated to his father ; New Arabian Nights to his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson, to whom also the papers of Essays of Travel are dedicated in a familiar note written at Monterey but withheld, with The Amateur Emigrant, for fifteen years ; Treasure Island, to his stepson, Lloyd Osboume, * an American gentleman,' then thirteen years old. Nelly van de Grift to whom Prince Otto is dedicated was a sister-in-law. Stevenson's dis- satisfaction with English politics at this time of Irish disorders and the death of Gordon is reflected in the dedication of More New Arabian Nights to the police officers, Cole and Cox, by way of protest at what he judged the weakness of the Government. The address of ^ Child's Garden of Verses to his nurse ' Cummy ' is perhaps the most graceful of all these dedications. The verse inscribing fekyll and Hyde to a cousin, Katharine de Mattos, is one of two pubHshed in the Letters. The two Scotch tales A BOOK OF R. L. s. ^^ Kidnapped and Catriona are offered to Charles Baxter. Apropos of his thought that his friend's son might hke the former tale when he was older, it is painful to recall that one of Baxter's two sons was reported missing from active service in Russia after the revolution of 1917. The Merry Men is dedicated to Lady Taylor, wife of the Colonial official and dramatist, Sir Henry Taylor, with whom Stevenson formed a close friendship on coming to Bournemouth. The dedication to his mother of Memories and Portraits, issued soon after Thomas Stevenson's death, has reference to their common sorrow. Of the two dedications to his wife, of The Black Arrow and the posthumous Weir of Hermiston, the former discloses the fact that it was the one book of his she could never read. Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, saluted in the dedication of The Master of Ballantrae, were the son and daughter-in-law of the poet, to whose genius Lady Shelley professed to discover a resemblance in that of Stevenson. The dedication of The Wrecker to Mr. Will H. Low in the Epilogue had its object in identifying him with the experiences of Loudon Dodd. The trio, Harry Henderson, Ben Hird, and Jack Buckland, to whom Island Nights Entertainments is addressed, were Stevenson's ship-mates in the * Janet NicoU,' whilst Underwoods was dedicated to the physicians who for the previous ten years had helped to keep him alive, in particular Dr. Thomas Bodley Scott of Bournemouth. Coming to the only work. Across the Plains, dedicated to some one not a personal friend — this was to M. Paul Bourget, whose works, jd> A BOOK OF R. L. S. and especially his * Sensations d'ltalie/ had excited Stevenson's liveliest admiration. Acknowledgment of the comphment failing to reach him, Stevenson, punctilious in such matters himself, burst out to Sir Sidney Colvin : ' He has taken my dedication with a stately silence which has surprised me into apoplexy. Did I go and dedicate my book to the nasty alien, and the 'norrid Frenchman and the Bloody Furrineer ? Well, I won't do it again ; and unless his case is susceptible of explanation you might tell him so over the walnuts and wine by way of speeding the gay hours.* The remaining works, Edinburgh, The Silverado Squatters, The Wrong Box and A Footnote to History, have no dedication. DEW-SMITH, A. G. A Cambridge friend of Stevenson's and, in a measure, the original of Attwater (q.v.) in The Ebb Tide. To Dew-Smith, R. L. S. wrote from Davos in 1880 the amusing verses, acknowledging the gift of a box of cigarettes. Among them : But what, my Dew, in idle mood, What prate I minding not my debt. What do I talk of bad and good, The best is still a cigarette. DOBSON, HENRY AUSTIN (1840- ) The poet, biographer, and writer on the eighteenth century became a friend of Stevenson's during the years of the latter's flying visits to London and the A BOOK OF R. L. S. 79 Savile Club. If he were not among his closest intimates, he has nevertheless expressed as finely as any one both the spirit of Stevenson's personality, and the sense of loss in its departure in the lines contributed by way of dedication to the New Century number of the ' Edinburgh University Magazine/ January 1901 : These to his memory. May the age arriving, As ours, recall That bravest heart, that gay and gallant striving, That laurelled pall ! Blithe and rare spirit ! We, who later linger By bleaker seas, Sigh for the touch of the Magician's fingers, His golden keys. DOGS, THE CHARACTER OF The dog friends whose qualities are the subject of this paper, included in Memories and Portraits, were Stevenson's companions during the period of his married life in Europe. At home the devotion of every dog to Thomas Stevenson disposed of owner- ship by any other member of the family. Bogue, whose chivalry for the opposite sex suffered so sudden a change, was a gift from Sir Walter Simpson on the family's first exodus to Davos, and remained an important member of it until his death at Bourne- mouth. The entrance way of Skerry vore still dis- plays the two tablets which R. L. S. put up to the memory of Bogue and of another Skye terrier, Coolin, distinguished by his nicely proportioned So A BOOK OF R. L. S. acts of gratitude. The paper appeared in the ' EngHsh Illustrated Magazine,' February 1884. DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN (1859- ) Stevenson opened a correspondence with Sir Conan Doyle by offering his compliments, on the ' very ingenious and very interesting adventures ' of Sherlock Holmes, the original of whom, Dr. Bell, the Edinburgh doctor, he correctly guessed. ' Sher- lock Holmes,' he wrote, * is the class of hterature that I hke when I have the toothache.' His address of Conan Doyle as ' fellow spookist ' is a reminder that among the writings of his which have not been republished is a letter on the psychical phenomena of dreams written to F. W. H. Myers, and contained in a paper by the latter on ' The Sublimal Conscious- ness ' in the proceedings of the Psychical Society, of which for some years Stevenson was a member. DREAMS, A CHAPTER ON While playfully pretending in this essay that in his dreaming hours his friends the Brownies, the Little People, did a good part of his work for him, Stevenson was describing experiences which were temperamental with him. As the paper declares, the main features of the two stories Jekyll and Hyde and Olalla came to him in dreams ; but the opinion of his biographer that they are the only stories which had this origin may be doubted when one recalls a letter to Mrs. Sitwell, written when he was twenty-four, and telling of his varied kinds of dream. As an example of a dream different from A BOOK OF R. L. S. 8i his usual ones of ' social miseries and misunder- standings ' he describes one * ... of long suc- cessions of vaulted, dimly-lit cellars full of black water, in which I went swimming among toads and unutterable cold, blind fishes. Now and then these cellars opened up into sort of domed music-hall places, w^here one could land for a little on the slope of the orchestra, but a sort of horror prevented one from staying long, and made one plunge back again into the dead waters. Then my dream changed, and I was a sort of Siamese pirate, on a very high deck, with several others. The ship was almost captured, and we were fighting desperately. The hideous engines we used and the perfectly incredible carnage that we effected by means of them kept me cheery, as you may imagine ; especially as I felt all the time my sympathy with the boarders, and knew that I was only a prisoner with these horrid Malays. Then I saw a signal being given, and knew they were going to blow up the ship. I leaped right off, and heard my captors splash in the water after me as thick as pebbles when a bit of river bank has given way beneath the foot. I never heard the ship blow up ; but I spent the rest of the night swimming about some piles with the whole sea full of Malays, searching for me with knives in their mouths. They could swim any distance under water, and every now and again, just as I was beginning to reckon myself safe, a cold hand would be laid on my ankle — ugh ! ' The essay appeared in ' Scribner's Magazine ' of January 1888, and is collected in Across the Plains. F 82 A BOOK OF R. L. S. DUDDINGSTONE The poem thus titled is one of a dozen or more lately published in New Poems and Variant Readings, which form a fragmentary autobiographical chapter of the early love-affairs on which Stevenson and his contemporaries alike are silent. It was written in 1871 [cet. 21), and others in the same vein belong to this year or to the two succeeding. With his de- parture to Mentone in the autumn of 1873 his mind found a diversion from what had evidently been passages of deep feeling. Not without regrets, however, for the following year found him writing : For thus on love I waited : thus for love Strained all my senses eagerly and long. The day has come and gone ; and once more night About my lone life settles, wild and wide. DUMAS'S, A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF Stevenson's admiration of the elder Dumas was by no means hmited to the ' Vicomte de Bragelonne,' to which this paper, first published in Memories and Portraits in 1887, is so glowing a tribute. * The brave old godly pagan,' he wrote, ' I adore his big footprints on the earth.' He couples Dumas with Shakespeare ; Dumas it was by whom the plays with Henley were inspired ; but no work of the French romantic seems to have compelled his homage Hke the character of D'Artagnan. The feeling is even more strongly expressed in a paper of the same period than in his essay on the subject proper : * Perhaps my dearest and best friend out- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 83 side of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan — the elderly D'Artagnan of the Vicomte de Bragelonne.' I know not a more human soul nor, in his way, a finer : I shall be very sorry for the man who is so much a pedant in morals that he cannot learn from the Captain of the Musketeers.' DYNAMITER, THE See ' More New Arabian Nights/ EARRAID See ' Memories of an Islet.' EBB TIDE, THE In 1890, the year after first reaching Samoa but before he had properly settled there, Stevenson and his stepson planned and began what they intended to be a huge novel, The Pearl Fisher — ' a black, ugly, trampling, violent story, full of strange scenes and striking characters.' About the end of the next year, when only a quarter of it had been done, the incomplete MS. was laid aside and would seem to have been abandoned until suddenly, in February 1893 (cBt. 42), in the midst of plans for St. Ives, Stevenson resolved to use * the butt end of what was once The Pearl Fisher in a new form as The Schooner Farallone.' It was to be finished in six weeks and was to end with a conversion of a chief character — apparently the idea which he had con- ceived, on the impulse of the moment, as the final chapter for the novel of more than two years before. The name was again changed — to The Ebb Tide — 84 A BOOK OF R. L. S. but it was not until June that the story was finished after endless rewritings and revisions of chapter after chapter. His letters during these months contain a diary of the daily — even hourly — stages of his effort to graft the new conception on the old. ' I break down at every paragraph . . . and lie here and sweat till I can get one sentence wrung out after another. Strange doom ! after having worked so easily for so long.' After all, the end, with its astonishing conversion of Davis, seems to have left him with doubts of the work. ' The tale is devilish and chapter xi the worst of the lot.' The truth seems to be that Stevenson reahzed he had taken his spade too deep in the black depths of human nature. His metier had mostly been the dark primitive passions of the race, but not even the conception of pure evil in Mr. Hyde is more repulsive than the trio of villainy in The Ebb Tide, where it is heightened against the dazzling beauty of the Pacific seas and beaches. A letter to Henry James shows that he scarcely expected the pubhc to accept the work for its art : * ... it will serve as a touchstone. If the admirers of Zola admire him for his pertinent ugliness and pessimism I think they will admire this ; but if, as I have long suspected, they neither admire nor understand the man's art, but only wallow in his rancidness, like a hound in offal, then they will certainly be disappointed in The Ebb Tide. Alas ! poor Httle tale, it is not even rancid.' If editions count for anything, the public has shown itself unperceptive ; after its first two impressions at the time of issue, The Ebb Tide A BOOK OF R. L. S. 85 waited eight years for the call for a third edition ; Catriona within the same period had run through eight. The shares in the book taken by the joint authors have been clearly defined. Mr. Lloyd Osboume has declared that the first four chapters remain, save for the text of Herrick's letter to his sweetheart, almost as he first wrote them ; from R. L. S. we have it that the second part is entirely his. This ending replaced the original plan of the tale which, as Sir Graham Balfour learnt from Stevenson, was the blinding of Attwater, and his return to England where, chiefly in Bloomsbury, the further develop- ment was to take place. The Ebb Tide appeared first in ' To-day ' under Mr. Jerome K. Jerome's editorship from November 1893 to February 1894. It was issued in 1894 in book form by Messrs. Heinemann, and the first edition of 237 pages has now a value of about fifteen shillings. EDINBURGH The house in which Stevenson was born (Novem- ber 13, 1850) stands in a street bordering Warriston Park in the northern part of the city. It is No. 8 in Howard Place, part of the thoroughfare which is now a tram route. The family moved to No. i Inverleith Terrace, nearly opposite, when Louis was three, and, four years later, to the much larger house at 17 Heriot Row, five minutes' walk to the north of Princes Street and with gardens between it and Queen Street. This remained their home until Thomas 86 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Stevenson's death. India Street, where Stevenson went to the school of a Mr. Henderson, is a turning out of the western end of Heriot Row. The Edinburgh Academy, where he was an irregular attendant as a boy of eleven or twelve, is in Henderson Row, five streets north of Heriot Row, but his chief schooldays were spent at the estabhsh- ment of a Mr. Robert Thomson in Frederick Street, joining Heriot Row to Princes Street. The old buildings of the University in South Bridge com- plete the list of the educational institutions which are among his associations with Edinburgh. The rooms of the Speculative Society remain as in Stevenson's time, and possess a memorial of him in the form of the Union Jack of the ' Casco.' The High Street in the Old Town is included in a Stevensonian's tour of Edinburgh if only to visit the Parliament House where Stevenson was admitted an advocate in 1875, and St. Giles Cathedral where is the medalhon memorial by Augustus St. Gaudens pre- pared from the bas-relief originally made in New York in 1887. To cross Princes Street again, at the comer of Antigua Street, ten minutes' walk down the broad thoroughfare, Leith Walk, still stands the shop where Stevenson bought the cardboard scenery and figures of Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured. EDINBURGH, PICTURESQUE NOTES If Stevenson's chapters contain scarcely a word of affection for his native city, the fact may be set down to the physical discomfort and mental dis- .O. u IIDWAKU ri.ACE, lilJlMJLKGH, WIIEKE L)lE\ENbOi\ WAS C01;N NU\'. IJ,, I05U A BOOK OF R. L. S. ^7 content of his Edinburgh days, as they appeared at close perspective, as well as to the critical spirit of his early years. Actually his love for the romantic capital was deep ; and deepened as his life continued to be passed in distant places. Even during a holiday in France, when he was twenty- two, he was constrained to write to his friend Baxter : ' After all, new countries, sun, music, and all the rest can never take down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place that it has been making for itself in the bottom of my soul, by all pleasant and hard things that have befallen me for these past twenty years or so. My heart is buried there — say, in Advocate's Close ! ' The papers, however, which first appeared in the * Portfoho ' June to December 1878, exhibit barely a trace of this feehng, but on the contrary contain passages which very naturally aroused the resentment of Edinburgh citizens. They were written partly in Edinburgh in the spring of 1878 {cBt. 28) and completed during the August of the same year at Monastier before setting out on the donkey journey. For all its criticism of certain national traits this work is perhaps the most Scottish in outlook of any of Stevenson's ; at any rate, most plainly exhibits a kinship in his thoughts with the spirit of the Covenanters. The long quotation in the chapter on Greyfriars, from Patrick Walker's ' Biographia Presbyteriana ' and other passages mark the Covenanting influence upon his thoughts from earhest childhood. Of the many references to Scottish and local incidents a few call for some explanatory comment. The * Sweet Singers,' who 88 A BOOK OF R. L. S. in Chapter I. are introduced into the blended picture of history and landscape, were an extraordinary sect of some twenty persons founded by a sailor, John Gib, and thus known also as Gibbites, in the latter half of the eighteenth century. They were opponents of the Covenant, and apparently of every religious system but their own, which consisted in renouncing all social obligations and wandering from place to place, a little band of the elect in a sinful world. Their name came from the chanting of the psalms, which was a chief part of their curiously conceived worship. Stevenson has a word in this picture too for Thomas Aikenhead, the twenty-year- old Edinburgh student, who was hanged about 1696 for disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity. Of the fall of a land of the Old Town which makes the dramatic end of Chapter II. there is a memorial in the Heave Awa' Tavern at Bailie Fyfe's Close, near to John Knox's house in the High Street. The tavern is on the site of the house which fell on Sunday, November 24, 1861, entombing thirty-five people, and the stone head of a youth and the inscription ' Heave awa' chaps, I am no dead yet,' on its front commemorates the courage of a victim of its fall. In the Chapter on ' Legends ' the selec- tion is wholly from the dark incidents of the city's past. The murder of Begbie, a porter of the British Linen Bank, on November 13, 1806, is one of those unsolved crimes such as Andrew Lang might have included in his ' Historical Mysteries.' The porter was found freshly stabbed to the heart and robbed of £4000 in Tweeddale's Close just off the High A BOOK OF R. L. S. 89 Street and now marked by Tweeddale House. But the crime is far less horrible than those of Burke and Hare, keepers of a lodging-house where for a year or more they made a business of murder, selling the bodies of their victims to the school of anatomy of Dr. Robert Knox, and escaping the notice of the law until the disappearance of an old woman brought their doings to hght and Hare to the scafold in January 1839. Deacon Brodie, who figures in this gallery of criminals, we know from the Stevenson-Henley play, but Major Weir is a tradition of seventeenth-century Edinburgh, which surrounds the idea of the double life with peculiar elements of horror. In mid life the Major was in command of the city guard, noted for his piety and ' remarkable gift of extempore prayer,' but in his latter years dreaded for the powers of sorcery attributed to him. The house on the West Bow where he lived with his sister was said to have had a spell cast over it, so that those who mounted the stairs felt as though they were going down. His end came from a voluntary confession to the authorities of incest, sorcery, and other crimes, and after his trial he was burnt on April 9, 1670. The staff, to the magic properties of which Stevenson refers, figures in the contemporary accoimts of his death as making 'rare turnings ' in the fire and, hke the Major, being * long a'burning.' Leaving these bygone horrors, the only other matter for comment is that of the stone in a field by the side of the road from Fairmile- head to the Hunter's Tryst, which Stevenson calls General Kay's Monument, and with which he 90 A BOOK OF R. L. S. connects a picturesque story of land tenure. The latter, however, applies to the Buck-stone on the estate of Penicuik, and let into the wall on the old road from Momingside station to the Pentland Hills, a little more than half-way to Fairmilehead. The stone to which Stevenson gives the local name of General Kaj^'s is known as the Kelstain (Battle Stone), and though supposed to mark the site of an ancient battle has no other tradition attached to it. After their appearance in the * Portfoho ' the chapters were issued in book form early in 1879, accompanied by the same illustrations as in the periodical, viz., five etchings by Brunet-Debaines, four after W. E. Lockhart, and one after Sam Bough, and twelve woodcut vignettes by H. Chalmers and R. Kent-Thomas. The value of this first edition is now about £15. EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824 A paper in the first number, January 1871, of the * Edinburgh University Magazine ' reviews the students of fifty years earlier through the glasses of the magazine of theirs, the ' Lapsus Linguae,* which had a scarcely less inglorious career than that over which R. L. S. and his friends presided. The essay is now available in Lay Morals. EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER, THE Apart from yachting cruises with his father, which were more than half for health or pleasure, the only practical touch with his intended profession of light- house engineer which Stevenson had was for three A BOOK OF R. L. S. 91 months, di\'ided, when he was a lad of eighteen, between Anstruther in Fifeshire, and Wick on the extreme north-eastern coast of Scotland. While he was supposed to be studying harbour construction, his ' one genuine preoccupation lay elsewhere.' The shop terms of the submarine builder interested him as new words for his vocabulary ; and the title of the essay, when he wrote it twenty years afterwards for ' Scribner's Magazine/ must have been chosen as a bit of satire, and ought by rights to have a note of exclamation at the end of it. His education for the engineering profession continued for a further two years until his father's opposition to its abandon- ment was overcome, and a compromise found in Stevenson's beginning to read for the Bar. The paper, which was published first in ' Scribner's ' for November 1888, is placed in Across the Plains with the prefixed title — Random Memories. EL DORADO This little sermon on happiness as a state of hope- ful pursuit rather than of attainment is akin to others of the papers in Virginibus Puerisque, in which it is placed in the collected works. It first appeared in ' London ' of May 11, 1878 {est. 28). ENGLISH ADMIRALS, THE A boy's adoration of the deeds of England on the sea characterizes this paper, written when Stevenson was twenty-eight. If it is a less fine example of his art as an essayist the reason may be found in the fact that such a tale of death courted 92 A BOOK OF R. L. S. in the face of hopeless odds, calls for a more spon- taneous use of words than his was. It is possible to agree with Mr. Swinnerton's criticism that the phrases are not those rushing from his enthusiasm ; that the finely picked sentences are false to the epic greatness of his subject. The paper appeared in the ' Comhill Magazine,' July 1878, and is included in Virginihus Puerisque. ENJOYMENT OF UNPLEASANT PLACES, ON THE The ' unpleasant place ' which provides the text of Stevenson's paradox in this paper — ' that any place is good enough to live a life in, while it is only in a few, and those highly favoured, that we can pass a few hours agreeably' — was Wick, the httle Caithness-shire fishing town where he spent six weeks as a lad of eighteen, professedly studying harbour construction. ' Wick,' as he wrote at the time, ' in itself possesses no beauty : bare grey shores, grim grey houses, grim grey sea, not even the gleam of red tiles, not even the greenness of a tree.' The pleasure in such bleak surroundings consisted in cherishing the moments when their discomforts were evaded, as when finding a refuge from the bitter wind, though it is possible that this was an after- thought, conceived when the paper was written six years later {cBt. 24). The reader will have noticed the feeling, not very far removed from dislike, which R. L. S. expresses in this paper for the scenery of the Scottish High- lands. It is landscape representing to him ' the hunted, houseless, unsociable way of life that was in A BOOK OF R. L. S. 93 its place on those savage hills.' At this time of his life the friendlier countryside such as he had visited in England and on the Continent was more to his taste. It was not until his first visits to the High- lands after his return from America that he began to look upon the bare hills of Perthshire and Argyll- shire with a different eye. And so his essays of landscape which were almost all of them his early writings never touch the Highlands ; while in Kid- napped, which is almost the only long work with a Highland background, the description is purposely made that of a Lowland youth to whom the moun- tains were unfriendly wildernesses. The paper appeared first in the ' PortfoHo ' of November 1874, and is placed in Essays of Travel. ENVOY The house of the verse which stands at the head of Underwoods was that of Stevenson's friend, Mr. Will H. Low at Montigny-sur-Loing, near Fontaine- bleau, afterwards converted into a riverside inn. It is the same place referred to in the essay Fontaine- hleau : ' Montigny has been strangely neglected ; I never knew it inhabited but once, when Will H. Low installed himself there with a barrel of piquete, and entertained his friends in a leafy trellis above the weir, in sight of the green country, and to the music of falling water.' EPILOGUE TO ' AN INLAND VOYAGE ' The title of this paper must have been a piece of advertisement on Stevenson's part, indeed, the only 94 A BOOK OF R. L. S. instance of commercial instinct in him which comes to mind, with the exception of his regular stipulation that every book of his should contain on the fly-leaf a list of all his publications according to the French custom. For the incident which the paper describes, viz., his arrest for half an hour as a German spy, occurred on a walking tour with Sir Walter Simpson in the Valley of the Loing in 1875, the year before the Inland Voyage. Whenever the piece was wTitten, it was not published until its appearance in ' Scribner's Magazine ' for August 1888. In the collected works it is placed in Across the Plains. ESSAYS OF TRAVEL The papers in this volume, which w^ere not collected in book form until after Stevenson's death, are those (The Amateur Emigrant) of his steerage voyage to America for his wife ; the four essays on the Alps are his impressions at Davos during the first winters after their return ; but with the exception of The Ideal House and Random Memories (of nursery days) all the others are writings in his earlier outdoor manner, viz., Cockermouth and Keswick, An Autumn Effect (Chiltern Hills), A Winter's Walk in Carrick and Galloway, Forest Notes (Fontainebleau), A Mountain Town in France (Monastier), The Enjoy- ment of Unpleasant Places, and his first pubhshed essay, Roads. EXETER Exeter was a compulsory halting-place of Steven- son for several weeks on a projected visit to Dart- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 95 moor in September 1885. With his wife and step- son and his cousin Katharine de Mattos he visited Thomas Hardy at Dorchester, but at Exeter was prostrated by a severe haemorrhage, which kept him in the New London Hotel. His room there (shown to visitors) contains a tribute in the shape of a memorial window, placed there in 1912 by mem- bers of the Exeter family of Mr. Maurice Drake, the novelist, glass painter, and, recently, soldier. In the hotel may also be seen Stevenson's entry in the visitor's book : * I cannot go without recording my obligation to every one in the house ; if it is your fate to fall sick at an inn, pray Heaven it may be the New London.' FABLES The writing of a review of Lord Lytton's ' Fables in Song ' was possibly the cause of Stevenson's attempting work in this literary form, the various types of which he had discussed in the notice of Lytton's book. At any rate in his twenty-fourth year he was writing certain of the fables, which remained unpublished until after his death, and are placed in the volume with Jekyll and Hyde. Sir Sidney Colvin makes a guess that these early pieces were The Yellow Paint and The House of Eld. The latter satire on traditional belief was no doubt prompted by the conflict at this time of his life between Stevenson's broad view of religion and his father's Calvinistic dogma. The fables were added to at various periods of his life — some were evidently written in the South Seas — in the aim of accumu- 96 A BOOK OF R. L. S. lating a number sufficient for a volume which had been promised to Messrs. Longmans. Their pubhca- tion in ' Longman's Magazine/ August and September 1895, was in partial redemption of this promise. FAMILIAR STUDIES OF MEN AND BOOKS Of the nine essays collected in this volume, seven had appeared in the ' Comhill Magazine.* The whole set range in date from 1874 to 1881 (cBt. 24 to 31), and thus belong to the period of Stevenson's life during which the papers in Virginibus Puerisque were written. The ' familiar studies ' are Victor Hugo's Romances, Some Aspects 0/ Robert Burns, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Yoshido- Torajiro, Frangois Villon, Charles of Orleans, Samuel Pepys, and John Knox and Women. In arranging them for republication R. L. S. prefaced them by some notes of self-criticism, in which he is at much pains to show where, as he thought, he had accorded less than full justice to his subjects. The first edition (of 397 pages) issued by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1882 has a value of about £6. FAMILY OF ENGINEERS, RECORDS OF A The writing of a history of his forbears was a task which, naturally enough, Stevenson long cherished. The eminence, particularly of his grandfather, Robert Stevenson, and his Uncle Alan in lighthouse engineering, merited such a work, while it would seem that the character of his father was to have provided a full-length study of an interestingly in- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 97 congruous personality. The title ' Memories of a Scottish Family ' contemplated soon after his father's death suggests his inclination at that time to make it a personal narrative. Its writing, how- ever, was not begun until the middle of 1891, on his settling down in the newly built Vailima, and was constantly being put aside and undertaken only as a relief from work such as The Ebb Tide, which was then making a great tax upon his powers. Never- theless the few chapters of this unfinished biography were written and rewritten under the influence of the conception which he then entertained of a decline in his fictional art. In biography, which he had previously attempted only in the memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, he professed to find a field which he Hked better than fiction, though the opinion may be set down to his state of dissatisfaction and anxiety which marked the year preceding his death. Thus we find him writing to Henry James : * By way of an antidote or febrifuge (to The Ebb Tide) I am going on at a great rate with my History of the Stevensons which, I hope, may prove rather amusing in some parts at least. The excess of materials weighs upon me. My grandfather is a delightful comedy part : and I have to treat him besides as a serious and (in his way) heroic figure, and at times I lose my way, and I fear in the end will blur the effect. However, d la grace de Dieu ! I '11 make a spoon or spoil a horn.' The manuscript as it was left at Stevenson's death was published in the Edinburgh edition and was not separately issued \mtil 191 1. 98 A BOOK OF R. L. S. FEAST OF FAMINE, THE See ' Ballads.' FERRIER, MISS (1844-1917) The sister of James Walter Ferrier takes a pro- minent place among Stevenson's correspondents by virtue of the letters written to her on news of her brother's death reaching him at Hyeres. Feelings of equally deep emotion are expressed in no others of his letters. Miss Ferrier came to stay for some weeks at Hyeres shortly afterwards, and the affection for his lost friend is shown in Stevenson's subsequent correspondence with herself. She died in Edinburgh in 1917. FERRIER, JAMES WALTER (1851-1883) The close friend of his student days, whom Stevenson called ' the best and gentlest gentleman ' he had ever known, came to an early death in cir- cumstances painful to those who loved him. R. L. S. has touched with becoming reserve on this first real grief of his life in Old Mortality. Henley, who had also shared Ferrier's friendship, has the lines : Our Athos rests — the wise, the kind, The liberal and august, his fault atoned. Rests in the crowded yard There at the West of Princes Street. . . . Ferrier's death, which came at the time of his own succession of serious illnesses in France, introduced, as his friends recognized, a grave element into Stevenson's thoughts. To his friend Gosse he wrote : * I trust also you may be long without finding out A BOOK OF R. L. S. 99 the devil there is in a bereavement. After love it is the one great surprise that life preserves for us.' FIFE, THE COAST OF The paper which on its first appearance in * Scribner's Magazine/ October 1888, bore the title, Contributions to the History of Fife, gossips of the piece of Fifeshire coast which Stevenson visited when he was thirteen in the company of his father, who was upon a tour of lighthouse inspection. He is fascinated by the romantic figure of Hackston, a member of the party of Covenanters at whose hands Archbishop Sharp met his death on May 3, 1679. The few details of Hackston which R. L. S. sets down are almost all that is knowTi of him. After the murder of the Archbishop he fled to the north, where for a year he eluded capture, but was executed at Edinburgh, July 1660, suffering im- speakable barbarities from his executioners. The paper is placed in the works as now issued in Across the Plains. FINSBURY, MICHAEL The character in The Wrong Box was drawn in part from Stevenson's friend, Charles Baxter, evidently in reference to the latter's capacity for grave demeanour in ridiculous circumstances. FONTAINEBLEAU— VILLAGE COMMUNITIES OF PAINTERS The paper on the life and manners of the Barbizon school treats, from the standpoint of the professional 100 A BOOK OF R. L. S. artist, the theme which was touched only casually in the earlier essay, Forest Notes {q.v.). Stevenson had revived his old association with the Fontaine- bleau painters by a visit to Barbizon, then already much changed, in the spring of 1881 on his way back to Scotland after the first winter at Davos. The paper was written two years afterwards (cBt. 33) at Hyeres for the ' Magazine of Art,' where it was published May and June 1884, and is placed in Across the Plains. FOREIGNER AT HOME, THE Not by accident is this paper on the sense of strangeness of the Scot in England made the first of the essays collected in Memories and Portraits. Parts of it reflect Stevenson's early impressions as a boy of ten at an English boarding-school, and more particularly those gathered on the visit to Suffolk (when he was twenty- three), which, in the formation of his friendship with Sir Sidney Colvin, became a turning point in his career. Although not written until nearly ten years later, during which time his joumej/s to England were fairly frequent, the paper conveys much the same sensations of his first visit as described then to his mother : * I cannot get over my astonishment, indeed it increases every day, at the hopeless gulf there is between England and Scotland, and English and Scotch. Nothing is the same, and I feel as strange and outlandish here as I do in France and Germany. Everything by the wayside, in the houses, or about the people strikes me with an unexpected familiarity ; I walk A BOOK OF R. I . S. zoj among surprises, for just where you think you have them, something wrong turns up.' The paper, which appeared in the ' Cornhill Magazine,' May 1882, was written after Stevenson had come to feel at home in France, to which fact, rather than to any bias of mind, may perhaps be ascribed his indiffer- ence to Enghsh character and history. FOREST NOTES The first of the two papers on the forest of Fon- tainebleau and the painters' communities there and on its outskirts, was written within a few months of Stevenson having first been introduced to these resorts of artists by his cousin * R. A. M. S.' The second — Fontainehleau {q.v.) — belongs to a period nearly ten years later. The first visit (to Barbizon) with his cousin was for a few days in April 1875. In July, after having passed his examination for the Scottish bar, he was there again ; and during the following three or four years, on frequent visits to France, his time was spent at Barbizon, Grez, Montigny, Cemay-la-Ville, Nemours, and Moret, alone, or with his cousin or Sir Walter Simpson. Forest Notes was sent to the ' Cornhill Magazine,' where it appeared May 1876, then edited by Leslie Stephen, who, as Stevenson wrote, 'is worse than tepid about it— hked " some parts " of it " very well," the son of Behal. Moreover he proposes to shorten it ; and I, who want money, and money soon, and not glory and the illustration of the English language, I feel as if my poverty were going to con- 102 A BOOK OF R. L. S. sent.' The paper is placed among the Essays of Travel. FIRST BOOK, MY The story of the writing of Treasure Island, written in the last year of his life, recalls — not quite accurately, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse — the circumstances in which the book had its origin in a map and a wet Highland holiday. It was in fact his seventh published book, and though it was the first long work of fiction to be issued, it had been preceded by a whole series of novels, one * The Vendetta of the West,' written when he was twenty-nine, but all relentlessly destroyed. The paper, first pub- lished in the ' Idler ' of August 1894, is placed in The Art of Writing. FOOTNOTE TO HISTORY, A— EIGHT YEARS OF TROUBLE IN SAMOA A great part of the last four years of Stevenson's life was occupied, very unfortunately for his literary work, in an active share in Samoan politics. For some years before he began to travel in the Pacific, the islands in which he at last made his home, had been in a disturbed condition from causes partly arising from native differences, and partly from foreign interference. Before ever he had reached Samoa he had espoused the cause of the native race of Honolulu, and in February 1889 had written to * The Times ' crying against German aggressiveness in Samoa, displayed not only in relations with the natives, but against American and Enghsh. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 103 Inasmuch as A Footnote to History records Samoan affairs from 1883 to 1891, it should be noted that Stevenson first set foot in Samoa at Christmas 1889, and after a brief stay was absent nearly the whole of the following year. Thus it was only during one of the eight years that he was in direct touch with what was going on. The history of the previous period he gathered from white residents such as H. J. Moors {q.v.) and others who more or less shared his political views, or at any rate from motives of interest w^ere opposed to the German element. The gathering of this material and the writing and re- writing of the book absorbed a large proportion of Stevenson's energy during i8gi and the spring of 1892 ; and however generous his motive no literary work of his was so ill-advisedly conceived. The cause of a handful of Polynesians enlisted no positive interest in England from the publication of the book, or Stevenson's letters to ' The Times.' The native and foreign interests — the latter those of Great Britain, Germany, and the United States — were supposed to have been reconciled, or rather, given the opportunity of settlement among themselves by the Convention of Berlin, which pre- dated Stevenson's first arrival in the island by a few months. The government of the group by officials appointed under the Convention, turned out to be government unmistakably in the German interest. The chief financial stake in Samoa was that of a German company of old establishment in the Pacific, and reconstructed under the title ' Deutsche Handels- und Plantagen Gesellschaft der Sud-see Inseln zu 104 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Hamburg.' This firm, the name of which Stevenson calls * a piece of literature,' like many another German business which the war of 1914-18 has dis- closed, was able to influence German official policy, which plainly was to inflame native feeling in its own interest. Stevenson's diagnosis was that ' the head of the boil of which Samoa languishes is the German firm.' Thus A Footnote to History will probably be read more for these pictures of German methods than for its sympathetic discussion of the division in native Samoan politics, the windings of which will strike most people, as they did Sir Sidney Colvin, as ' exasperatingly petty and obscure.' Suffice it to say that Stevenson, at a real risk of deportation, was successful in compelling the removal of the two officials appointed under the Berlin Convention. The native parties he failed to reconcile. The chief, Mataafa, whose fitness for the Samoan kingship he had advocated, but whom the Germans had opposed, was defeated in civil war and exiled. He was even- tually elected as the native monarch by the Germans after the cession of Samoa to them in 1899. The book, despite its outspoken language, proved so free from ofence to the managers of the German firm that its arrival in Samoa was celebrated among themselves. But in Germany on its publication there as a Tauschnitz edition, it was confiscated, and its publisher fined. There is a memorandum from Stevenson suggesting that a sum of over ^^60 should be sent to Tauschnitz as a half share of his fines and expenses. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 105 FRASER, MISS MARIE Miss Fraser paid a visit of some months to Samoa in 1892, and on several occasions stayed with the Stevensons at Vaihma. Her book, ' In Stevenson's Samoa ' (London, Smith Elder, 1895), is a pleasant account of this visit, describes the feast on Steven- son's birthday, and contains sketches of the Vailima household of a kind not found elsewhere. FRASER, SIMON, MASTER OF LOVAT Stevenson draws a particularly sinister portrait of the junior prosecuting counsel in the Appin trial in Catriona, He was the young son of the old and notorious Simon, Lord Lovat, * that old grey fox of the mountains,' as R. L. S. calls him, who had made a pretence of loyalty to the Crown in the '45, while he had secretly committed himself to the Jacobites. Young Simon, then nineteen, had been pushed by his father into the rebellion rather against his will, and was with the Prince's forces up to Culloden, where two hundred and fifty Frasers were slain. On the suppression of the rising in 1746 he surrendered himself to the authorities, and was lodged in Edinburgh Castle. During the year that he remained there his father paid the price of his own duplicity by his execution on Tower Hill, acting a part to the last moment of his life. The son, on his liberation in 1747, was among the few rebels who did not share in the general pardon of that year, but in 1750 he obtained a full pardon, and a few months afterwards w^as called to the Scottish Bar, a poor means of subsistence in the place of his father's io6 A BOOK OF R. L. S. estates, which were confiscated by the Crown in that year. His share in the Appin trial was characterized by especially gross distortions of justice. No doubt the part was planned for him, but he would not have been his father's son if he had deserved less than Mr. Mackay's judgment (in ' The Appin Murder ') that ' he performed the most astounding feat of casuistry known to Scottish legal historians ' in justifying the then illegal practice of using the declarations of the accused's family on the ground that they were not produced to prove the truth of anything contained in them, but * only to prove that the persons who emitted the declarations averred these things.' These gifts of sophistry did not long ♦ enrich the Scottish Bar. He soon afterwards joined the army, and in 1757 was placed in command of a Fraser battalion with which he saw active service in the wars with the French in America. In 1762 he was made a brigadier-general, and fought with the British forces in Portugal against the Spaniards. In 1774 a special Act of Parliament authorized the return to him, as ' a particular mark of grace,' of the forfeited Lovat estates, ten years before the like w^as done for any other of these attainted in the '45. The title he never recovered, for he died without issue in 1782, aged fifty-six, after having been for many years a member of the House of Commons, where apparently his most notable contribution to the debates was in support of the repeal of the Act prohibiting the wearing of the kilt in the Highlands — unless, as he grimly added. Parliament could level the mountains. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 107 GAS LAMPS, A PLEA FOR A paper in * London ' of April 27, 1878 (cat. 28) on the slender theme of the comfortable glow of gas illumination, then threatened by electricity. The harsh lighting of electric arc lamps struck R. L. S. as fit for the corridors of lunatic asylums ; and electric illumination earned a measure of welcome only for the romantic possibihty of the instan- taneous creation of a pattern of light over a city by one touch of a * sedate electrician.' The paper is included in Virginihus Puerisque. GEDDIE, JOHN Defining the ' country ' of R. L. S. as the valley of the Water of Leith from its source in the northern spurs of the Pentland Hills to its mouth at Leith, Mr. Geddie has recalled the associations of the places bordering this twenty-mile stretch of water with Stevenson's own life and with such of the scenes in his writings as are laid there. ' The Home Country of R. L. Stevenson ' (Edinburgh, W. H. White, 1898) is also a guide to much of the topography and local history of this strip of Midlothian. GENESIS OF ' THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE ' See ' Master of Ballantrae, The.' GOSSE, EDMUND (1849- ) In his essay on Stevenson in ' Critical Kitcats ' (Heinemann, 1896) Mr. Gosse has drawn the most intimate picture of R. L. S. in the days when both io8 A BOOK OF R. L. S. were at the beginning of their hterary careers. A firm friendship sprang up when Stevenson, then twenty-seven, first met Gosse, who was his senior by a year. It lasted until the day of his death and has its record in the many letters to ' My dear Weg.' The last of these, written only two days before his sudden end, has almost a clairvoyant passage in it : ' Come to think of it, Gosse, I believe the main distinction (between them) is that you have a family growing up around you and I am a childless, rather bitter, very clear-eyed blighted youth. I have in fact lost the path that makes it easy and natural for you to descend the hill. I am going at it straight. And where I have to go down, it is a precipice.' Very different is Mr. Gosse's sketch of Stevenson as he first knew him, when a cardinal quality was his gaiety and childlike mirth ; when he was often * excessively and delightfully silly.' There was one circumstance which in their early friendship must have drawn them together. Both in their intel- lectual development had experienced the suft'ocating influence of a Calvinist father. But for all the differences which arose between Stevenson and his father — and they existed in any intensity only for a year or two — his childhood and youth were passed in a paradise of happiness in comparison with the years of tyranny, born of the narrowest rehgious creed, which was the lot of his friend until manhood. It would be a libel upon the elder Stevenson to suggest that his son's early days in any degree approached those which Mr. Gosse has described, with a tolerant recognition of their humour, in ' Father and Son : A BOOK OF R. L. S. 109 A study of two Temperaments ' (London, Heinemann, 1907). The essay in ' Critical Kitcats ' remarks the change in Stevenson as year after year passed without improvement, but the reverse, in his health. After the illness which at Nice in 1884 was nearly fatal ' he was never quite the gay child of genius that he had previously been. Something of graver caste became natural to his thoughts ; he had seen Death in the cave. And now for the first time we traced a new note in his writings — the note of Pulvis et Umbra.' When Stevenson left England (finally as it turned out) in August 1887, Mr. Gosse was one of the very few friends who saw him the day before he sailed, and found him in this great and dark adventure of his life ' radiantly humorous and romantic.' Stevenson had then just found popular fame : Mr. Gosse, now thirty years after, continues to appeal to the more eclectic admirers of his poems, biographies and studies of French literature. Among the first is the address * To Tusitala in Vailima,' written just before Stevenson's death, and striking the note of regret at the fate, ' half delectable, half tragic,' which isolated him from his friends in Europe. The Pentland edition (1906-7) of Stevenson's works appeared under Mr. Edmimd Gosse's editorship. GRANT, WILLIAM, OF PRESTONGRANGE The Lord Advocate for Scotland appears in Catriona as a kindly and courtly gentleman, com- pelled to plead political necessity in defence of a no A BOOK OF R. L. S. course which he felt was judicially indefensible. Stevenson makes him justify the suppression of a vital witness ; his real irregularity was that of appearing at the Circuit court at Inveraray where, as he well knew, a Campbell jury was to condemn James Stewart. Appointed chief legal adviser of the Crown in Scotland in the year after the '45, the duties of public prosecutor fell to him through the stormy times after the rising and, save in the Appin case, were discharged with a degree of moderation and justice which is not altogether suggested by the portrait of him in Catriona. But then there is Stevenson's defence of it in the first-person plan of the tale : * Davie cannot know. I give you the inside of Davie, and my method condemns me to give only the outside of Prestongrange and his pohcy.' The family of the Lord Advocate in Catriona is imaginary in the sense that Stevenson created the characters of his daughters, or rather of one of them, and omitted all mention of his wife, who long survived her husband's death in 1764. GRAVER AND THE PEN, THE See ' Davos Press.' GREAT NORTH ROAD, THE The novel, of which only eight chapters were written, comes in point of time between Treasure Island and Kidnapped. It was begun at Bourne- mouth about 1884, when the success of the former prompted Stevenson to plan other tales of adventure. Though the highway was to be the motif of the story A BOOK OF R. L. S. iii it was not, so it would appear, to have been a tale of highwaymen. A novel of this type called Jerry Abershaw had been begun and discarded. To a correspondent who had heard of The Great North Road, Stevenson wrote : * It will not, however, gratify your taste ; the highwayman is not grasped ; what you would have liked (and I, believe me) would have been Jerry Abershaw ; but Jerry was not written at the fit moment ; I have outgrown the taste — and his romantic horse-shoes clatter faintlier down the incline towards Lethe.' The Great North Road was included in the Edinburgh edition and is now pubhshed, with the two other fragments of novels, in Lay Morals. GUTHRIE, LORD (CHARLES JOHN GUTHRIE) (1849- ) Lord Guthrie, who has been one of the Senators of the College of Justice in Scotland since 1907, was Stevenson's senior by a year and a fellow student of his during his reading for the Bar. They were Presidents of the Speculative Society in 1872. In addition to his short contributions in the way of reminiscences of R. L. S. he is the author of the little book on * Cummy ' (see Cunningham, Alison) and has earned the gratitude of Stevensonians by making Swanston Cottage (Stevenson's summer home for twelve years), of which he is the tenant, in part a museum in which are collected portraits, manuscripts, and other memorials of the novelist and of his family and associates, including the cabinet made by the notorious Deacon Brodie, which 112 A BOOK OF R. L. S. stood in the Stevenson nursery when R. L. S. was a child, and is so referred to in the paper Nuits Blanches. HADDEN, TOMMY The companion of Carthew on the vo^^age of the ' Currency Lass ' in The Wrecker was drawn from the South Seas character, Jack Buckland (q.v). HAMERTON, PHILIP GILBERT (1834-1894) The artist, essayist, and author of ' Landscape in Art ' has a special place among R. L. S.'s literary friends, for he was the first editor to place anything of Stevenson's before the public. The essay Roads appeared in ' The Portfolio ' which Hamerton had founded with Richard Seeley in 1873, and which for twenty years under his editorship held a leading place among literary and artistic periodicals. Of other essays of Stevenson's which appeared in its pages the most notable are those on Edinburgh. Like Stevenson, Hamerton made a sudden marriage which proved full of happiness. His wife was a Frenchwoman, and there is a counterpart, in their case, of Stevenson's Silverado experience in the life which they lived immediately after their marriage on the otherwise uninhabited island of Innisdrjmich on Loch Awe, an unusual beginning for a bride who had never set foot in Great Britain, but one which she accepted without demur. It was in the Scottish mountains that Hamerton found the material for the book * A Painter's Camp in the Highlands,' which showed him to be a leading authority on art, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 1x3 Afterwards, on a partial failure of his financial resources, he settled in France for the rest of his life and there wrote the books, such as ' Round My House,' which provide the most intimate under- standing of French people's social customs. Stevenson was a visitor at the Hamertons in London and at their French home at Autun, and some very fresh impressions of him as a light-hearted boy of twenty-five are contained in the * Autobiography ' of Hamerton, published in 1897. They are really those of Mrs. Hamerton, who, on her husband's death in 1894, continued the story of his life which he had completed up to the time of their marriage. The perfect English of the book was a remarkable achievement, considering that Mrs. Hamerton had lived for only a short time in England and prior to her marriage knew nothing of the language. HAMMERTON, J. A. (1871- ) Mr. Hammerton, writer and journalist, is the com- piler of a volume ' Stevensoniana ' (Edinburgh, John Grant, 1903), in which are collected mis- cellaneous extracts from books and periodicals; some, personal reminiscences, but for the most part literary criticisms and appreciations drawn from very diverse sources. Much of the matter is arranged in chronological order, and so obtains for the book in its second edition the description — an * anecdotal life ' of R. L. S. An original contribution to Steven- son literature is Mr. Hammerton's ' In the Track of Stevenson ' (Bristol, Arrowsmith, 1907), the record of a pilgrimage over the routes traversed by R. L. S., 114 A BOOK OF R. L. S. and described in An Inland Voyage and Travels with a Donkey. The photographic illustrations are a re- minder that R. L. S. did not travel for scenic attrac- tions. We see the inhospitable character of the Cevennes country, and the bare stretches of river and canal. Among these photographs of the canoe voyage are a number which have since obtained tragic interest from the fact that the places them- selves, Landrecies, Noyon, and others, have suffered more or less complete destruction in the war of 1914-18. HAMILTON, CLAYTON (1881- ) An American writer, and author of * On the Trail of Stevenson ' (Hodder & Stoughton, 1916). The trail is twofold. Mr. Clayton has made Steven- sonian pilgrimages in Scotland, France and America, and identifies places with the doings and writings of R. L. S. Except for California and the South Seas his visits have embraced the wide fields of Stevenson's wanderings. But the other and more interesting form of the trail is the conversations he had with friends and others who knew Stevenson in the flesh, some, notably Andrew Lang, Henry James, and * Cummy,' since dead. The personal reminiscences, though second-hand, are specially worth preserving, since they have arisen in response to questions to which Mr. Hamilton, saturated with Stevenson's personality, craved for rephes. Thus, from Mr. Gosse, it is elicited that Stevenson was embarrassed by the society of very young children ; from Henry James, that in his worst years of illness A BOOK OF R. L. S. 115 (at Bournemouth) he did not suffer actual pain ; and from Andrew Lang, that at first he heartily dishked Stevenson. The reproductions of drawings by Walter Hale add to the attractiveness of a fine piece of book-making. HEALTH AND MOUNTAINS In the introduction to this short paper Stevenson contrasts the sensations of invahds such as himself in the mild air of the Riviera, and in the cold heights of Alpine valleys. The essay Ordered South had analysed his feelings during his invalidism at Mentone, where, however, there was much to admire in the surrounding country. His discomfort in the Alps, whither he had come [cat. 30) at the onset of winter on his return from California with his wife, is marked by a dislike of the Alpine landscapes : * A glaring piece of crudity, w^here everything that is not white is a solecism ; a scene of blinding definition ; a parade of daylight, almost scenically vulgar, more than scenically trying and yet hearty and healthy, making the nerves to tighten and the mouth to smile — such is the winter daytime in the Alps/ Admirers of Alpine scenery will be hard put to it to find a re- sponsive note in this and the other three papers which contain Stevenson's first impressions there as an invalid debarred from moving far afield from Davos. The paper appeared in the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' February 17, 1881, and is placed in Essays of Travel, HEATHER ALE See ' Ballads.' ii6 A BOOK OF R. L. S. HEATHERCAT The tale, of which only three chapters were written, was to have been an historical novel on the grand scale, and set in the years 1690 to 1700. Opening amid the religious persecutions in Scotland, it was to have developed against the background of the ill-fated Scottish colonizing enterprise in Central America — the Darien adventure, in which so much of the wealth of Scotland was lost. It was in 1698 that 1200 Scots set sail from Leith on the wild pro- ject, inspired in part by commercial rivalry with England, of making a district of the Panama isthmus an entrepot of world commerce. Their sufferings from famine and social disorder, to say nothing of their final defeat in battle with the Spaniards, formed a series of disasters, out of which few of them made their escape. The tale, as he wrote in the June preceding his death, to his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, was ' to present a whole field of time ; the race — our own race — the Westland and Clydes- dale blue bonnets, under the influence of their last trial, when they got to a pitch of organization in madness that no other peasantry has ever made an offer at. I was going to call it " The Killing Time," but this man Crockett has forestalled me in that. All my weary reading, as a boy, which you remember well enough, will come to bear on it.' The opening sentence of the fragment, first published in the Edinburgh edition, and now in Lay Morals, appears inconsistent with Stevenson's first intention to set the story mostly out of Scotland, in Carolina, and next in Darien, but there is no other evi- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 117 dence to show the final shape which he had in mind for it. HENLEY, WILLIAM ERNEST (1849-1903) ' I wish your honesty were not so warfaring,' wrote R. L. S. to Henley in reference to a dispute, on Stevenson's behalf, with an editor. The sentence underlines the characters of the two friends — Henley, his life long, a challenger ; Stevenson, for all his outbursts of indignation, the compatible associate of all sorts and conditions of men. Their friendship began through the introduction of Leslie Stephen, to whom as editor of the ' Comhill Magazine ' they were both known. Henley when only twenty-four had come to Edinburgh infirmary for treatment of the tuberculosis which had lost him one foot, and threatened to cost him the other as well. Their meeting is thus described by R. L. S. : ' Yesterday, Leslie Stephen, who was down here to lecture, called on me and took me up to see a poor fellow, a sort of poet who writes for him, and who has been eighteen months in our infirmary, and may be, for all I know, eighteen months more. It was very sad to see him there, in a little room with two beds, and a couple of sick children in the other bed. Stephen and I sat on a couple of chairs, and the poor fellow sat up in his bed with his hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace, or the great King's palace of the blue air. He has taught himself two languages since he has been lying there. I shall try to be of use to him.' Henceforward they were on the closest terms of ii8 A BOOK OF R. L. S. friendship until Stevenson's final departure from Europe. R. L. S. is the * Apparition ' of Henley's poem ; Henley is ' Burly ' in Talk and Talkers (q.v.), and the original of John Silver (q.v.), a piece of imagination on Stevenson's part which, with a good deal of reason, he could never bring himself to Hke. Many of Stevenson's works were published in two of the periodicals which Henley successively edited —the short-lived ' London ' and the ' Magazine of Art.' It was to the ' Scots Observer,' then edited by Henley, that R. L. S. sent his Damien letter, the pubhshing of which was doubtless congenial enough to Henley's fearless, fighting spirit. For three or four years (1882-5) Henley acted informally as Stevenson's honorary agent in dealings with London publishers. The arrangement came to an end on Stevenson wishing Henley to retain a proportion of the payments. It was chiefly during this period that they collaborated in the plays, an enterprise in which Henley was the moving spirit, and of which Steven- son was glad eventually to be rid. The letters to ' My dear lad,' in the published collection, grow less frequent after Stevenson's final departure from England, but there is no reason to assume any dis- guise of a lesser regard for Henley in the end of a letter from Samoa in 1892 acknowledging a book of the latter's poems : ' I did not guess you were so great a magician ; these are new tunes, this an under- tone of the true Apollo ; these are not verse ; they are poetry — inventions, creations in language. I thank you for the joy you have given me, and remain your old friend and present huge admirer.' It was A BOOK OF R. L. S. 119 on the publication of the ' Life ' of Stevenson, seven years after his death, that Henley astonished the literary world by the bitterness of his review in the ' Pall Mall Magazine ' of December 1901. The frank disparagement of Stevenson in these pages is per- haps less offensive than the repeated suggestion that there are things which are better left unsaid. A per- sonal disagreement had estranged the two during the latter years of Stevenson's life, but in the rancour of his feelings towards R. L. S. Henley could not avoid inviting the assumption of jealousy of his friend's greater fortune as the motive of his bitterness. The article called forth numerous protests, among which perhaps the most notable is that of Andrew Lang in ' The Morning Post ' of December 16, 1901. The correspondence between Henley and R. L. S. on the private disagreement which separated them in their later years passed into the hands of their common friend, Charles Baxter, and is preserved in the Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, but is not accessible to the public. HIRD, BEN This member of the trio of shipmates to whom Island Nights Entertainments is dedicated was a Scot, known throughout the South Seas for his straight deahngs. He had travelled much in the Pacific, so that Stevenson introduced him into The Beach of Falesa, without explanation, as one of its institutions. Pearling and trading, he had seen more of island life than most whites, and the tales he had to tell during the months they were fellow-passengers on 120 A BOOK OF R. L. S. the ' Janet Nicoll/ were a mine of romantic material for Stevenson from the fact that Hird was no mere pitcher of yams, but scrupulous in his efforts at accuracy. HONOLULU Stevenson was twice a resident for some months in the capital of the Hawaiian islands. The first occasion was at the end of the cruise in the ' Casco ' on January 24, 1889. The family first rented the Manuia Lanai, a pavilion of the native pattern at Waikiki, four miles from Honolulu and joined to the sea beach by grassy lawns. They then moved to a more substantial cottage close by. Among the many residents by whom he was entertained and whom he entertained was the last king of the Hawaiian State, Kalakaua, a dissipated but com- petent semi-savage for whom Stevenson formed more than a formal regard. The king died in the following year. It was from Honolulu that Stevenson went by himself upon the visit to the island of Molokai, where he spent a week at the leper settlement. This was in April, a month after Father Damien's death. There he played croquet with the leper children, and on his return sent a grand piano to the girls' school. The second residence, four years later, was meant to have been for a few days but extended to nearly three months. He arrived in September, 1893, having come for the sake of the sea voyage and intending to return by the next boat. But an attack of pneumonia suddenly developed, and he was not well enough to return to Samoa until November. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 121 During the greater part of this time he hved at a hostelry called Sans Souci again at Waikiki. The bust by Hutchinson, exhibited at the New Gallery Summer Exhibition, 1895, belongs to this period. A detailed account of Stevenson's sayings and doings during both visits is contained in the book by Arthur Johnstone {q.v.). HUGO'S ROMANCES The study of the great French romantic, in which is traced his higher development of the novel of romance from the traditions of Fielding and Scott, was Stevenson's first exercise in the field of critical appreciation which obtained publication, if indeed it was not the first attempted. It was written during his six months invahdism [cet. 24) at Mentone, and on its being sent to Leshe Stephen, then editor of the ' Comhill,' was the subject of a cordial letter of encouragement (inserted in the Letters, vol. i. pp. 133-5), the modest terms of which to an aspirant nearly twenty years his junior bespeak both Stephen's fine courtesy and his estimate of Stevenson's powers. The relations thus established with the * Comhill,' where the paper appeared, August 1874, continued for many years, and led to the best and the greatest number of Stevenson's essays and tales appearing in its pages. HUMBLE REMONSTRANCE, A In joining issue with Henry James in the paper bearing this title, Stevenson was prompted by a contribution of the former's on ' The Art of Fiction ' 122 A BOOK OF R. L. S. to * Longman's Magazine/ September 1884, after- wards reprinted in * Partial Portraits.' Between two writers of such widely different aims, as widely different views of the essence of their art were to be expected. So far as the particular paper of Henry James is concerned — for it is to be taken as a very partial discussion of the subject — their difference of view may be said to reside in the relative value they attach to incident, or rather to the degree to which the art of the writer may make incident interesting. Here obviously they started with radically different ideas of the kind of incident which might serve a writer as subject matter. To Henry James, a young man deciding after all not to enter the Church was ' incident ' ; Stevenson would need to feed his art on stronger meat. Though it does not so appear in the paper, the undercurrent of his thoughts would seem to have run upon this disparity between the material which he chose to use and that which Henry James found sufficient for his studies in — the phrase is Stevenson's — ' the statics of character.' The letter quoted in the paragraph on Henry James on another page lends colour to this view, and a postscript to it suggests that James had detected what was a real ground of difference between them : * I have re-read my paper, and cannot think I have at all succeeded in being either veracious or polite. I knew, of course, that I took up your paper merely as a pin to hang my own remarks upon ; but, alas ! what a thing is any paper. What fine remarks can you not hang on mine ! How have I sinned against proportion and, with every effort to the contrary, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 123 against the merest rudiments of courtesy to you. You are indeed a very acute reader to have divined the real attitude of my mind.' The paper appeared in ' Longman's Magazine,' December 1884, and was included by Stevenson in Memories and Portraits as a fitting continuation of A Gossip in Romance. HYERES AND MARSEILLES After an autumn at Marseilles in 1882, during which his health suffered, Stevenson with his family made their last stay of any duration in France at Hy^res, viz., from February 1883 to May 1884. The first month was spent at the Hotel des lies d'Or, but in March they moved to the chalet La Sohtude, the charms of which, or rather of its garden and prospects, he was never tired of repeating. One passage from a letter is a type of many : ' I live in a most sweet comer of the universe, sea and fine hills before me, and a rich variegated plain ; and at my back a craggy hill, loaded with vast feudal ruins. I am very quiet ; a person passing by my door half startles me ; but I enjoy the most aromatic airs ; and at night the most wonderful view into a moonHt garden. By day this garden fades into nothing, overpowered by its surroundings and the luminous distance ; but at night, and when the moon is out, that garden, the arbour, the flight of stairs that mount the artificial hillock, the plumed blue gum-trees that hang trembhng, become the very skirts of Paradise. Angels I know frequent it ; and it thrills all night with the flutes of silence.' 124 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Though rarely able to be beyond the borders of this small estate, a person, as he said, ' with an established ill-health,' he was free throughout the year from acute illness, and for the first time his income from writing came very near to £500. But in January 1884, on a visit to Nice with friends from Edinburgh, he had his first experience of illness in which his life was despaired of. Returning to Hyeres in February, the rest of his stay there was passed in a state of complete prostration, and when in June he was able to be moved, it was decided to return to England with a view to securing the best medical advice. Except for a short visit to Paris he never saw France again, and the next three years were spent at Bournemouth. Afterwards at Samoa Stevenson wrote in answer to an imaginary question: * Happy, said I. I was only happy once; that was at Hyeres ; it came to an end for a variety of reasons, decline of health, change of place, increase of money, age with his stealing steps.' The passage confirms the observation of friends at the time, that these first near-hand encounters with death introduced a graver tone into Stevenson's thoughts and writings. The gay youth was at last a little less able to put aside the facts of his life. A house of the name of Campagne Defli in the suburb of St. Marcel, five miles from Marseilles, was Stevenson's home during the last three months of 1882. He came there in search of a climate which would suit him and be less trying to his wife than Davos, where the two previous winters had been spent. But after having contracted lung trouble at A BOOK OF R. L. S. 125 Montpellier, he was more than ordinarily ill at St. Marcel, and the residence came to an end by Stevenson going to Nice, when just able to travel, leaving his wife to follow him. Letters and telegrams miscarrjdng, the two had no news of each other for a week, during which time Mrs. Stevenson had to endure the suggestions of the police that her husband had died at some wayside station and been buried. They at last met in Marseilles, and next settled at Hyeres. IDEAL HOUSE, THE It is a rather pathetic comment upon this paper that Stevenson's incessant travels in search of health condemned him to live in such houses as he could find, and never to remain long in any. In Europe his longest stay was in the house at Bournemouth, given to his wife by the elder Stevenson ; and when at length he found a measure of health in the South Seas, he lived only two years after the completion of Vaihma. The essay was written at Davos in 1880 or 1881 [cBt. 30), during the first year of married hfe, and thus evidently represents the ideal which he and his wife planned to realize should it have been found possible for him to live in one place. Sir Graham Balfour, who made a lengthy stay at Vailima, says that many of the features of structure and particularly of position which characterize the house of the essay, were reproduced in the building on the hills above Upolu. The paper appears not to have been published 126 A BOOK OF R. L. S. until the issue of the complete works, but has since been included in Essays of Travel, INLAND VOYAGE, AN R. L. S.'s first book, published in May 1878 by Messrs. Kegan Paul. The voyage was made in the autumn of 1876 {cBt. 26) in company with Sir Walter Simpson {q.v), the 'Cigarette' of the book. Their cruise, in two canoes, was first by canal from Antwerp to Brussels, and thence on the rivers Sambre and Oise by places such as Landrecies, La Fere, and Noyon, largely destroyed in the last year of the war of 1914-18. At Pointoise, eighteen mules short of the Seine, the journey came to an abrupt end ; the river there becomes uninterestingly wide, and the two travellers were nothing loth to exchange the bois- terous, squally weather, which had been their lot nearly the whole of the time, for a favourite resort of theirs, the artists' colony at Grez on the Loing, a little beyond the Forest of Fontainebleu. R. L. S. had written of the delight to ' awake in Grez, to go down to the green inn garden, to find the river streaming through the bridge, and to see the dawn begin across the poplared level. The meals are laid in the cool arbour under fluttering leaves. The splash of oars and bathers, the bathing costumes out to dry, the trim canoes beside the jetty, tell of a society that has an eye to pleasure.' It seems that it was on this return to Grez that R. L. S. first met Mrs. Osboume, whom he after- wards married. Thus the last sentence in the book : * You may paddle all day long ; but it is when you A BOOK OF R. L. S. 127 come back at nightfall and look in at the famihar room that you find Love or Death awaiting you beside the stove ; and the most beautiful adven- tures are not those we go out to seek.' For it was in the following year (1877) that the book was begun in Edinburgh — it was completed in France early in 1878 — during which time R. L. S's attachment for Mrs. Osbourne had become part of his hfe. But, apart from his father's allowance, he was almost without means. To Sir Sidney Colvin he wrote : ' I am at The Inland Voyage again ... I only hope Paul may take the thing : I want coin so badly, and besides it would be something done. ... I should not feel such a muff as I do, if once I saw the thing in boards with a ticket on its back.' Much of the book is a literal transcription of the log-book written daily on the journey ; chiefly the longer passages of reflection were written in the intervening year and a half. And on the preface, as the author wrote, four whole days were spent. On its appearance the book received slight though favourable notice from the reviewers. The earnest- ness of R. L. S. in the art of writing is shown in a letter to his mother on the tone of the critics : ' The effect it has produced on me is one of shame. If they like that so much, I ought to have given them some- thing better, that 's all.' The sales of the Voyage in the first years of publication were small. In 1883 it had reached only a second edition, and shortly afterwards it cost Thomas Stevenson only £100 to buy back from the publishers the copyrights 128 A BOOK OF R. L. S. in it, in the Travels with a Donkey, and the first volumes of his son's essays. Twenty-eight years afterwards the route of the Voyage was retraversed by Mr. J. A. Hammerton who, in In the Track of Stevenson, has recorded the few traces he found of recollection of the canoeists. By then, the hospitable bachelor Juge de Paix of Landrecies was married ; the kindly M. Bazin of La Fere (' of cursed memory ') dead, but Mme. Bazin still the possessor of a copy of the Voyage which R. L. S. had sent to her late husband. Original editions of the Voyage, issued with the frontispiece by Walter Crane, have recently been sold for about £20. In 1902 an edition was issued at 6s. by Messsrs. Chatto & Windus, with photo- graphic illustrations. An edition in French with illustrations was published in 1900 as A la Pagaie, sur I'Escaut, le canal de Willebroeck, la Samhre et Oise (Paris, Emile Lechevalier). IN MEMORIAM, F. A. S. The verses of No. XXVII. of Underwoods are ad- dressed to his old friend Mrs. Sitwell [q.v.], who had come to Davos during Stevenson's stay there in the spring of 1881 to be with her son during the last months of his life. One of the verses has been chosen as the inscription of a memorial of Stevenson him- self. See Silverado Squatters. IRELAND, ALEXANDER (1810-1894) The Scottish journalist and critic, the confidant of Robert Chambers and friend of Carlyle, Leigh A BOOK OF R. L. S. 129 Hunt, and R. W. Emerson, was a correspondent of Stevenson's, to whom when an old man he wrote with questions on HazHtt, whose hfe he was about to write. Ireland's death at the age of eighty-four took place within a few days of Stevenson's, but the last ten years of his life were passed under a reverse of fortunes caused by the political ups and downs of Manchester journalism, in which he had long played an important and brilliant part. ISLAND NIGHTS ENTERTAINMENTS The title of the volume which includes The Beach of Falesa, The Bottle Imp, and The Isle of Voices. On hearing of the arrangements in 1892 for their issue together, Stevenson was disappointed. He had meant to keep The Bottle Imp as the piece de resistance for a collection of fantastic tales which were to have had the general title. Still he assented to its inclusion with The Beach of Falesa, one of his most realistic pieces of writing, and would have added The Waif Woman but for Mrs. Stevenson's objections. The first edition (Cassell, 1893), issued at 6s., with illustrations by Gordon Brown and W. Hatherell, has a value of about 15s. The first named artist's drawings for The Beach of Falesa pleased Stevenson exceedingly, and he sent to him a letter in which he wrote : ' Your creation of Wiltshire is a real illumina- tion of the text. It was exactly so that Wiltshire dressed and looked. . . . Nor should I forget to thank you for Case, particularly in his last appear- ance. It is a singular fact — which seems to point I 130 A BOOK OF R. L. S. still more directly to inspiration in your case — that your missionary actually resembles the flesh and blood person from whom Mr. Tarleton was drawn. ISLE OF VOICES, THE The fairy-tale of magic treasure belongs probably to Stevenson's fourth year in the South Seas [cBt. 42), and was intended to be kept, with others, towards a volume of stories all in a form of pure fantasy. It was judged as ' not up to the mark of The Bottle Imp' which was to be the leading piece of this collection. When, however, the two tales were published with The Beach of Falesa [q.v.) as Island Nights Entertainments, Stevenson consoled himself with the consideration that the ' queer realism ' of the two fantasies linked them, in a measure, with that most realistic of his tales. JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916) The American novelist and critic became one of the closest of Stevenson's friends during the latter's residence at Bournemouth, where he was the most welcome of visitors. It was during this period that Henry James's paper on the art of fiction prompted Stevenson to rush in with a rejoinder in the article A Humble Remonstrance {q.v.). Mr. James's paper had illustrated certain methods of a novelist's artistry by a reference to Treasure Island, which brought from Stevenson the frank declaration of the feeling which the delicate art of Mr. James produced in him : ' I seem to myself a very rude, left-handed countryman ; not fit to be read, far less compli- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 131 mented by a man so accomplished, so adroit, so craftsmanlike as you. . . . Each man among us prefers his own aim, and I prefer mine ; but when we come to speak of performance I recognize myself, as compared with you, to be a lout and a slouch of the first water.' Yet it is not surprising to find Stevenson following this passage of admiration of Mr. James's fine skill in characterization with the coaxing appeal for a little more of the dramatic quahty in his works. ' Could you not,' he writes, * in one novel, and to oblige a sincere admirer, and to enrich his shelves with a beloved volume, could you not, and might you not cast your characters in a mould a Httle more abstract and academic (dear Mrs. Pennyman had already, among your other work, a taste of what I mean) and pitch the in- cidents, I do not say in any stronger, but in a slightly more emphatic key — as it were an episode from one of the old (so-called) novels of adventure. I fear you will not ; and I suppose I must sighingly admit you to be right. And yet, when I see, as it were, a book of Tom Jones handled with your exquisite precision, and shot through with those side-lights of reflection in which you excel, I relinquish the dear vision with regret. Think upon it.' If no result of this exhortation is traceable in Mr. James's novels, the artist in Stevenson continued to find them the purest delight, numbering them among the few books of his contemporaries in fiction which he read with pleasure. Of Stevenson two studies are to be found in the works of Henry James. That in ' Partial Portraits ' (London, Macmillan, 1888) was written 132 A BOOK OF R. L. S. in 1887 a year after the publication of Kidnapped. The second is in ' Notes on NoveHsts ' (London, Dent, 1 914), and is an appreciation more of Steven- son's personaHty than of his writings. JAPP, DR. ALEXANDER HAY (1837-1905) From the acquaintance who visited Stevenson at Braemar in 188 1 and took away with him the manu- script of Treasure Island (q.v.), Dr. Japp became a close friend of Stevenson's for some years. He was a prolific and versatile writer and journalist, who rose from a quite humble beginning to be the author of many books under his own name and several pseudonyms. His last work, published in the year in which he died, is * Robert Louis Stevenson ' (London, Werner Laurie, 1905), of interest chiefly for its reminiscences of the Braemar visit, and for its reproduction of Stevenson MSS. JEKYLL AND HYDE See ' Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.' JENKIN, HENRY CHARLES FLEEMING (1833- 1885) Fleeming Jenkin, noted for his work in engineering and applied electricity, was one of R. L. S.'s closest friends in his early days. When Jenkin, then thirty- five, became Professor of Engineering in Edinburgh University, Stevenson, much against all his inclina- tions, was professedly studying to qualify himself for his father's calling. Actually Jenkin's first relation with R. L. S. was to remonstrate on his per- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 133 sis tent absence from the classes. From this un- promising beginning developed an intimacy of which Stevenson long afterwards wrote in a lettter to Sir Sidney Colvin : ' I owe you and Fleeming Jenkin, the two older men who took the trouble and knew how to make a friend of me, everything that I have or am.' Jenkin in fact arrived in Edinburgh just when Stevenson, then eighteen, was entering on the mood of revolt against conventional religious beliefs and social prejudices ; when also he craved for friends of broad interests in the w^orld of books. In Jenkin he found no specialist professor of the German type, but a boyish personality of varied tastes, a great lover of literature and art, a slave of the drama, and a profuse talker. This random out- flow of opinions, which was an inexpressible relief to R. L. S. from the rigid judgments of his father's circle of friends, was indeed the element in Jenkin's character which made him unpopular among scien- tific men. But it found a hungry admirer in Stevenson, who afterwards in Talk and Talkers (where Jenkin is Cockshot) described his friend as ' bottled effervescency.' Apart from talk, the Jenkins' home, where R. L. S. had a fast friend in Mrs. Jenkin, introduced him to the congenial re- creation of amateur theatricals, in which he was an occasional though a poor performer. The friend- ship of the two men has its testimony in Stevenson's biography of Jenkin (see below), of whose loyalty there can surely be no better proof than his employ- ment of R. L. S. as his private secretary for six months when serving as a juror at the Paris Ex- 134 A BOOK OF R. L. S. hibition of 1878. A person with Stevenson's aver- sion from an orderly routine of work could hardly have been an ideal secretary. The Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin, which Stevenson (^^- 35) wrote on his friend's death in 1885, was undertaken at Bournemouth with the assistance of Mrs. Jenkin. It is the only biographical work which Stevenson completed, and rather curiously is said to be the book which his wife thought the most successful of his writings. It appeared as a preface to Jenkin's * Collected Literary and Scientific Papers/ published by Longmans in 1888 under the editorship of Sir Sidney Colvin and J. A. Ewing. It was reprinted in the Edinburgh edition, but was not issued separately by Messrs. Longmans until 1912. The complex genealogy of the Jenkins which forms the iirst chapter was afterwards the genesis of a long historical novel which Stevenson planned but did not live to carry out. A South Sea friend on a first dip into the Memoir had taken it for a novel and had been struck by its unusual character. The incident suggested to R. L. S. a novel of several generations, to the outline of which he gave the title The Shovels of Newton French. JERSEY, DOWAGER-COUNTESS (MARGARET ELIZABETH) (1849- ) During her late husband's governorship of New South Wales, Lady Jersey visited Samoa and formed a warm friendship with Stevenson, with whom an excursion was made — incognito, as her position required — to the camp of Mataafa, the rival for the A BOOK OF R. L. S. 135 position of native monarch whose cause Stevenson supported. Her visit prompted his writing of the privately printed romance An Object of Pity, a rare piece of Stevensoniana in which Lady Jersey, her brother, Captain Leigh, Sir Graham Balfour, Mrs. Stevenson, and R. L. S. himself are the characters. JOHNSTONE, ARTHUR Author of ' Recollections of Robert Louis Steven- son in the Pacific' (London, Chatto & Windus, 1900), a wordy book, but of interest in recalling Stevenson's doings during his two visits to Honolulu — in 1889, when he stayed five months, and in 1893, when illness prolonged an intended visit of a few days to three months. No trifles of his life during these two periods are too small for Mr. Johnstone, who gathered conversations of his with many people, and reports verbatim an address to the Scottish Thistle Club. The author devotes several chapters to Stevenson's interference in the politics of the Pacific, which he considered ill-judged. The volume contains some impromptu verses written by R. L. S. at Honolulu, and includes also Father Damien's report to the Hawaian Board of Health on his ad- ministration of the leper settlement in Molokai. KELMAN, REV. JOHN (1864- ) The author of ' The Faith of Robert Louis Stevenson ' (Edinburgh, Ohphant, Anderson & Ferrier, 1903), chose a very insufficient title for his work, which is by no means confined to a discussion of Stevenson's attitude towards religious belief. 136 A BOOK OF R. L. S. but is a very comprehensive study of his personahty as revealed in his writings. Dr. Kelman was an Edinburgh schoolboy when R. L. S. was the random traveller of the canoe voyage and the Cevennes journey, yet was thus nearly enough a contemporary of his to have a sympathetic recollection of the Edinburgh of his day. No other of the books on Stevenson represents so painstaking an effort to reconstruct his moral and intellectual qualities from his works. And on the purely literary side the same method of research is applied to show the direct influence of the Covenanting writers on Stevenson's style. Altogether it is an illuminating sidelight on the narrowness of view sometimes attributed to the Free Kirk, that a man reared in her traditions is found to possess the Catholic taste and breadth of mind necessary to produce what is one of the most sympathetic analyses of Stevenson's many-sided personality. KIDNAPPED In writing this, his third, book for boys, Stevenson turned from scenes and characters of pure invention to real people and places of a minor incident of Scottish history. The Appin murder, which provides the turning point of the story, has thereby become known to thousands who had not before heard of Alan Breck or the wrongly condemned James Stewart. The Highlands, in their unsettled state after the '45, are made the setting for the adventures of the sober David Balfour, in whose prim ways and staid talk Stevenson found the contrast with the A BOOK OF R. L. S. 137 rebel spirits of the Highland Jacobites. Save for the change of year from 1752 to 175 1, he keeps very close to the historical facts, as may be seen from the outline of these latter in the chapter on the Appin murder on another page. A single episode of this kind, grafted on to imaginary adventures, just suited Stevenson's genius for romantic incident, while it did not lay upon him the physical strain of managing a full stage of historical characters in the manner of Dumas or Scott. Thus Kidnapped has the features of both an historical romance and a boy's book of adventure. In blending the two Stevenson satisfied his young readers, and compelled the admiration of such non-adventurous bookmen as Matthew Arnold and Henry James. Scarcely any other of his longer works was written with the same ease or at so great a rate. Asked by the publishers of * Young Folks ' for a successor to The Black Arrow in the pages of their magazine, he stipulated for not less than thirty shillings a column (of 1200 words), a rate of payment three times that for Treasure Island and little enough for work such as his. A considerably larger sum was eventually paid, for in the interval of making a small beginning on the tale at Bournemouth early in 1885 and com- pleting it in the following year, the publication of Jekyll and Hyde had made Stevenson one of the vmters of the day in public estimation, whose name alone must have been worth a good deal to the publishers of a popular magazine. When taking up the story again early in 1886 [cat. 36), it unfolded itself with a degree of inspiration which Stevenson 138 A BOOK OF R. L. S. afterwards declared was a single experience : ' in one of my books, and in one only, the characters took the bit in their teeth ; all at once, they became de- tached from the flat paper, they turned their backs on me and walked off bodily ; and from that time my task was stenographic — it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote the remainder of the story.' In this spirit Kidnapped was completed, and published in ' Young Folks ' May i to July i, 1886. The abrupt end of the story had its cause in a break for the worse of the indoor invalidism which passed for health during the greater part of Stevenson's life at Bournemouth. An opening was therefore left for a sequel in which the characters of David and Alan could reappear, but six years went by and the South Seas were reached before the trial of James of the Glen for the Appin murder was taken as the skeleton of Catriona (q.v). If David Balfour had then become, as R. L. S. confided to his friends, three years older instead of three days, his author equally shows the greater power in the sharp delineation of character which marks his most mature work. Stevenson's writings, as may here be fittingly said, may be broadly traced as beginning with the picturesque rendering of outdoor effects, next developing in stories of incident, and from them broadening into the round drawing of char- acter. One phase merges into another, and many of his works owe their charm to the comminghng of picturesque landscape and romantic adventure. But Kidnapped, while it belongs to the second phase, is exceptional in the slight use which A BOOK OF R. L. S. 139 Stevenson deliberately makes of his earlier practice. David is a lowland lad and is made to take the English eighteenth - century view of the Scottish Highlands as a region of wildernesses unfit for civilized beings. Though he describes the Highlands vividly enough it is with a sense of their lonesome- ness, never with the enthusiasm which Scott created for them among the travelling public. In Catriona the homeher setting of much of the story removes this necessity ; and so we get in it pictures of places and drawing of people which belong to the earliest and latest phases of Stevenson's power as a writer. In Kidnapped the portraits of historical characters barely number half a dozen, and with the exception of the redoubtable Alan Breck make but one appear- ance on the scene. Campbell of Glenure we see only at the moment of his death and James of the Glen on the day following the murder. The other two, the chieftain, Cluny Macpherson, and Robin Oig, son of Rob Roy and an even greater rascal than his brother James More, are separate and partial sketches providing interest to the interludes in the wandering of David and Alan. They are the subjects of separate chapters, but of the other characters, the miserly uncle, seamen, catechists and the discreet lawyer Rankeillor, nothing can be added to the Stevensonian narrative. On the other hand, an afternoon can be spent with an ordnance map of Argyllshire and Perthshire in tracing the course of David's journeys in the western Highlands. The map included in the first edition of Kidnapped, since it bears the names of only those 140 A BOOK OF R. L. S. places mentioned in the itinerary, leaves plenty of room for speculation as to the course which Stevenson from his Bournemouth bedroom plotted for his two fugitives in the recesses of the Grampians. In cast- ing David on the islet of Earraid, which at low tide is joined to the most western point of the Isle of Mull, he was revisiting a spot which he knew well from his visits there with his father. From Earraid to Torosay, where David crosses to the mainland, is twenty-five miles as the crow flies ; from Kinlochine (across the Sound of Mull) to Kingairloch, whence he embarks for the eastern bank of Loch Linnhe, about half this distance. The woods of Lettervore, by the mouth of Loch Leven, are only a mile or two from Duror whence he escapes with Alan after the murder. Thence their journeyings are over wild regions (as they still are) ; first due east, then by a northerly cut across the Pass of Glencoe and, doubling on their course, to the mountain nook overlooking Loch Leven near Coalasnaccon, and then by long marches to Cluny's cave in Ben Alder where Prince Charles Edward lay hidden for a fortnight, a month before his escape to France in 1746. This wa^ the most northern point in their wanderings. Their journey south to the Lothian country on the south side of the Forth lay through the southern masses of the Grampians to Balquidder ; from Strathyre eastward in to the mountain Uam Var and so down the river Allan to the head of the Forth at Stirling. Their last stage is by the villages of Alloa, Clackmannan, and Culross to Limekilns, where they are put across to the Lothian shore. Altogether at a moderate A BOOK OF R. L. S. 141 estimate not far short of two hundred miles, for the most part over rough mountain country, much of which is still as untravelled as at the period of the story. The first edition, issued by Messrs. Cassell (1886), and containing a folding chart of the cruise of the brig ' Covenant ' and the ' probable course ' of David's wanderings has a value of about 15s. KIPLING, RUDYARD (1865- ) Stevenson was far from coming under the spell of Mr. Kipling's writings either in verse or prose. ' Soldiers Three ' evoked his warmest congratulations, in sending which to the author he addressed Kip- ling's creation, Mr. Mulvaney, and wrote : * They tell me it was a man of the name of Kipling that made ye ; but indeed and they can't fool me ; it was the Lord God Almighty that made you.' Mr. Kipling, by way of acknowledgment, made his char- acter address himself to Alan Breck, a pleasantry that in turn prompted Stevenson's rejoinder in which the redoubtable Highlander is re-created as the writer of a characteristically quarrelsome letter. Yet Stevenson, so far as is disclosed by the letters, felt a very qualified admiration of Mr. Kipling's literary art — amazed * by his precocity and various endowments,' and alarmed by his ' copiousness and haste.' To an expression of his pleasure in Henley's poems, he added : ' How poorly Kipling compares ! He is all smart journalism and clever- ness ; it is all light and shallow and limpid, hke a business paper — a good one, s'entend ; but there is 142 A BOOK OF R. L. S. no blot of heart's blood and the Old Night ; there are no harmonics ; there is scarce harmony to his music/ He did, however, admit that Barrie, Henry James, and Kipling, were the three contemporaries he could read, and was disappointed that an intended visit of Mr. Kipling to Vailima was never made. KNOX AND HIS RELATIONS TO WOMEN Some credence may be given to the belief that Stevenson wrote the partial study of the great churchman and reformer as much out of a filial feeling as from a leaning towards the warfaring character of Knox. It was one of the papers which existed in more or less a rough shape at the time of the crisis between himself and his father, as the out- come of which he addressed himself to making the unfinished work ready for publication. For more than a year [cet. 23 to 24) he laboured on Knox, entirely re-casting provisional drafts of the paper, and whether the prosecution of the subject was or was not undertaken in the aim of providing common ground for his own and his father's interests, it is at any rate evident from his letters that he had enough of Knox by the time he had finished with him. The paper appeared in * Macmillan's Maga- zine,' September and October 1875, and though placed last in Familiar Shidies of Men and Books, was the second of those essays to be written. LANG, ANDREW (1844-1912) The poet, critic, and folklorist, was R. L. S.'s senior by six years. The first impression which one A BOOK OF R. L. S. 143 formed of the other, when they first met in 1872' did not augur a hfelong friendship. Stevenson's curt description of Lang was ' good-looking, dehcate, Oxfordish, etc/ On Lang, as he wrote long after- wards, the effect of R. L. S. was ' not wholly favour- able. ... He looked, as in my eyes he always did look, more like a lass than a lad, with a rather long, smooth oval face. . . . Here I thought is one of your aesthetic young men.' Their friendship was based less on personal grounds than on their common bookishness and Scottish race, but it lasted until R. L. S.'s death, only two days before which he was writing to thank Lang for an engraving of Braxfield, the Weir of Hermiston, whom Stevenson was then drawing. In the application for the Edinburgh professorship Lang was one of Stevenson's sup- porters, and it was he no doubt who four years later (in 1885) turned in Stevenson's direction the writing of a volume on Wellington for a series of English Worthies. The book was never written, for within a year or so R. L. S., then in very delicate health at Bournemouth, left England for good. That Stevenson's stories had a ready admirer in Lang is shown by the latter's opinion of Treasure Island : ' Except Tom Sawyer and the Odyssey, I never liked any romance so well.' In 1891 R. L. S. wrote : ' I have the most gallant suggestion from Lang with an offer of MS. authorities which turn my brain. It 's all about the throne of Poland, and buried treasure, in the Mackay country, and Alan Breck can figure there in glory.' This was an unpublished Jacobite pamphlet on Prince Charles 144 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Edward's hidden years which, with other Jacobite MSS., Lang sent out to Samoa a Httle while before Stevenson's death. Besides the introductory essay to the Swanston edition of Stevenson's works Lang's writings on R. L. S. are a criticism of his works first pubhshed in ' Essays in Little ' (1892), and personal recollections included in * Adventures Among Books ' {1905) ; and in Lang's books on Jacobite history, notably ' Pickle the Spy ' and ' Companions of Pickle ' are references to the real people in Kid- napped and Catriona. LANTERN BEARERS, THE A paper of which R. L. S. VvTote that it ' really contained some excellent sense, and was ingeniously put together.' The ingenuity consisted in taking, as his text of a sermon on the intangible nature of joy in life, his boyish games with bull's-eye lanterns on the piece of sandy coast near North Berwick at the mouth of the Firth of Forth, which was a favourite playground of his in his early teens. The text is a vivid picture of Stevenson's romantically conceived boyhood : the sermon, a variation of the theme of which he never tired, namely, a man's joy of life consisting not in its external circumstances but in the fancies which he weaves. The paper appeared in ' Scribner's Magazine,' February 1888, and is placed in Across the Plains. LAY MORALS The vigorous declamations against the comfort- able view of Hfe of the well-to-do which resound A BOOK OF R. L. S. 145 with such vehemence in these chapters represent the rebelhous spirit of Stevenson's thought in his early manhood. They were written in 1879 (cet. 29), and though re-drafted and extended four years later were left uncompleted. Of the closeness with which some of these views of youth continued to mark his mental outlook in later years there is a piece of evidence in the remark of his biographer on the Hke- ness of his conversation, when in certain moods, to these early railings against the canons of respecta- bihty. The merit commonly attached to material success, as personified by * Mr. Samuel Budgett, the Successful Merchant/ always moved Stevenson to anger. This sermon, where it emerges most succinctly into a philosophy of life, shows Stevenson preaching the stupidity of confusing wealth with money and, as a corollary, demanding that the rich shall con- tinually earn their money in service. The idea of money here expressed may be paralleled from a passage in a letter from Mentone to Mrs. Sitwell when he was twenty-three : ' It is an old phrase of mine that money is the atmosphere of civilized life, and I do hate to take the breath out of other people's nostrils. I live here at the rate of more than ^^ a week, and I do nothing for it. If I didn't hope to get well and do good work yet, and more than repay my debts to the world, I should consider it right to invest an extra franc or two in laudanum.' These papers, Lay Morals, furnish the title to a volume in which both earlier and later miscellaneous writings are included. The latest edition at the 146 A BOOK OF R. L. S. present time (1919), that of 1911, contains the Damien letter, The Pentland Rising, The Day after To-morrow, the papers from the ' Edinburgh Univer- sity Magazine/ criticisms and early sketches, as well as the fragments of the unfinished romances, The Great North Road, The Young Chevalier, and Heathercat. LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD (1866- ) Mr. Le Gallienne, to whom Stevenson wrote a letter of warm appreciation of his work in poetry and criticism, has made his ' Elegy ' the title-piece of a volume of verse — ' Robert Louis Stevenson and Other Poems ' (London, John Lane, 1895). He, among the critics of the younger generation, has been a discerning student of Stevenson's versatile genius, the highest expression of which, and that conferring lasting fame upon it, he is inclined to see in the essays. LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE THE CAREER OF ART The paper, which Henry James calls ' a little mine of felicities,' was one of the series written at Saranac in the winter of 1887-8 for ' Scribner's Magazine,' where it appeared in September 1888. It there replaced another ' On the Choice of a Profession ' written about the same time, but put aside as being in too cynical and sombre a vein to appear in com- pany with the other essays of brighter note in preparation for the series. Mr. Lloyd Osboume in publishing the first paper in * Scribner's Magazine,* A BOOK OF R. L. S. 147 January 1915, has made this explanation of its origin. The Letter is placed, in the collected works, in Across the Plains. LETTERS The first series of letters to be pubhshed were those addressed at fairly regular monthly intervals to Sir Sidney Colvin from November 1890 to October 1894. These are the Vailima Letters issued by Messrs. Methuen in 1895. A general collection, including the above, was issued by Messrs. Methuen in 1899 as The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to his Family and Friends in two volumes uniform with the Edinburgh edition, with notes and introductions by Sir Sidney Colvin. The fourth edition of 1901 contains additional letters to Rudyard Kipling, Austin Dobson, and George Meredith. The still larger collection, now current, was issued in 1911, again under Sir Sidney Colvin's editorship, in four volumes as The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. LIGHT FOR LIGHTHOUSES, ON A NEW FORM OF INTERMITTENT This small contribution to the technics of light- house engineering was a paper read before the Royal Scottish Society of Arts on March 27, 1871 {cat. 21), and received the Society's silver medal. Stevenson's invention, in which no doubt his father had the greater share,- consisted in rotating a hemispherical reflector round the radiant (which is placed at its axis), and so producing alternating periods of light 148 A BOOK OF R. L. S. and darkness in the direction of the seaman. By subdividing the reflector, the alternations of hght and darkness could be made more frequent, and coloured glasses could be inserted to give more variety to the intermittency of the light. The paper appears only in the complete editions of his works. When making this technical commrmication Stevenson had made up his mind not to follow his father's profession, for at the same time he wrote some verses entitled * To the Commissioners of Northern Lights—with a paper/ and beginning : I send to you, commissioners, A paper that may please ye, sirs (For troth they say it might be worse An' I believe 't) And on your business lay my curse Before I leave 't. The verses, where Stevenson anticipates W. S. Gilbert in suggesting that by taking up law he may come to be a Commissioner himself, were not pub- lished until included in New Poems and Variant Readings. L. J. R. Initials of the society of Stevenson's early Edin- burgh days mentioned in the dedication of Kid- napped. In addition to R. L. S. and Charles Baxter, R. A. M. Stevenson and James Walter Ferrier (all in their teens) were members of this society of six, which met in a pubhc house in Advocate's Close. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 149 Mr. Baxter, a year or two before his death, recently disclosed that the title stood for ' Liberty, Justice, Reverence,' and that the constitution, which he drafted, and R. L. S. whole-heartedly accepted, included ' among other objects under the first head " the abolition of the hereditary privileges of the House of Lords," a phrase which occasionally raised stumbling-blocks in impassioned orations/ * Yes,' wrote R. L. S. to him in 1891, ' I remember the L. J. R., and the constitution, and my homily on Liberty, and yours on Reverence, which was never written — so I never knew what reverence was. I remember I wanted to write Justice also ; but I forget who got the billet.' Mr. Baxter has added : * I remember, as if it were yesterday, Stevenson's agonized face as he came to me with the news that his father had come across the draft — it never went further. The discovery was the occasion of one of the most painful of scenes between father and son.' LOCKER-LAMPSON, FREDERICK (1821-1895) The Victorian minor poet, best known as Frederick Locker and by his ' London Lyrics,' figures in the Letters, apropos of a misunderstanding of a charitable appeal to him by Stevenson, to which he had gener- ously responded though not in the way intended. Some verses by Stevenson form the introduction to Locker's ' Rowfant Rhymes.' Stevenson does not figure in Locker's personal reminiscences of his friendships with Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, and a host of other Victorians published as ' My Con- 150 A BOOK OF R. L. S. fidences/ for the two never met for the reason that Locker was also a man of chronic ill-health, and their relationship began only a year before Steven- son's final departure from Europe. LODGING FOR THE NIGHT, A This vivid and dramatic passage in the Hfe of Fran9ois Villon is Stevenson's first short story, written when he was twenty-seven. It was a com- plete departure from the landscape sketches and literary reviews which had formed most of .his previous writings. Brilliant as were those which followed it, such as Will o' the Mill and Providence and the Guitar, this first example of his art as a teller of tales may well be thought to mark his highest level of imaginative writing. The incident, w^hich is one with a large basis of fact, had already been marked for an exercise in fiction. In his essay on Villon of the same year he traces the evil career of that friend of the poet's, Regnier de Montigny, which ended on Paris gibbet. Among the charges which cost Montigny his life was that for the murder of one Thevenin Pensete in a house by the Cemetery of St. John. With a ready assumption of his guilt R. L. S. adds : ' If time had only spared us some particulars might not this last have furnished us with the matter of a grisly winter's tale ? ' So he sets the scene in the Httle house by the cemetery, which is identified in documents of the time as the H8tel du Mouton, a haunt of Villon and his rascally com- panions. The remaining two of these, Guy Tabary and Dom Nicholas, he chooses from a party which A BOOK OF R. L. S. 151 broke into the College of Navarre in 1456, and carried away five hundred crowns of gold. We keep to the ascertained facts of the poet's life in his visit to the Chaplain of St. Benoit, by whom for a time he had been adopted, and from whom he took the name of Villon ; and we come to pure invention only in the passage between the seigneur of Brisetout and his nocturnal visitor. The tale, which first appeared in * Temple Bar,' October 1877, is placed in the published works in New Arabian Nights. LOW, WILL H. (1853- ) The American painter of portraits and mural decorations has collected in ' A Chronicle of Friend- ships ' (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1908) the reminiscences of his intimacy with Stevenson for some years in France, and afterwards for a short time in America. Mr. Low came to Paris as an im- pecunious art student in 1873, when he was twenty. To the atelier of Carolus Duran where he studied, it chanced that R. A. M. Stevenson came also in the course of following a study of art, begun at Antwerp. They were already firm friends, when news came one day in the spring of 1875 that ' Louis was coming over.' Mr. Low has preserved his first impression of Stevenson as he ahghted from the Calais train : ' It was not a handsome face until he spoke, and then I can hardly imagine that any one could deny the appeal of its vivacious eyes, the humour or pathos of the mobile mouth, with its lurking sugges- tion of the great god Pan, or fail to reahze that here was one so evidently touched with genius that the 152 A BOOK OF R. L. S. higher beauty of the soul was his.' Mr. Low was a sharer of much of Stevenson's hfe in the frequent visits he paid to France in the years 1875-9. He recalls their long sitting out of dejeuners at Lavenue's restaurant ; their glimpses of the Bohemian life of the Parisian art student, which R. L. S. afterwards put into The Wrecker ; but, for the greater part, the days in Fontainebleau Forest when R. L. S. had made himself at home in the artist community at Siron's inn at Barbizon. The surroundings were a relief from the straitlaced life of Edinburgh ; in Mr. Low's pages we see his days of ' industrious idle- ness ' in the Forest, on long walks, or book in hand by the easel of some artist friend. We follow him to Montigny and Grez, where, however, Mr. Low was before him. in meeting Mrs. Osbourne and her daughter — ' the elder, slight, with delicately moulded features and vivid eyes, gleaming from under a mass of dark hair ; the younger of more robust type in the first precocious bloom of womanhood.' On Stevenson's first return to Grez after their arrival his friends were not long in perceiving the line of his affections : henceforward his former circle was largely deserted for the lady who was to share his life. From this time, with the exception of a brief excur- sion from Bournemouth to Paris, when Stevenson, Low, Henley, and Rodin, made up a dinner party, Mr. Low's next and last personal association with R. L. S. w^as to welcome him. and his wife and mother on their arrival in New York by the ' Ludgate Hill.' The forest rambler was then famous, besieged by pressmen, and the talk of the day in connection A BOOK OF R. L. S. 153 with Mansfield's performance of Jekyll and Hyde. Mr. Low's personal association lasted for a short while longer on Stevenson's return from Saranac. Mrs. Stevenson in San Francisco was then seeking a yacht for the Pacific voyage, and R. L. S., in leaving Mr. Low to join her, broke the last link with his mixed years of illness and travel in Europe. LYTTON'S ' FABLES IN SONG ' The first work in reviewing, of which some con- siderable amount was done at the beginning of his career, was a commission from Mr. John Morley (now Lord Morley) for the ' Fortnightly Review.' It was accomplished [cet. 24) with some difficulty, and Stevenson wrote of the paper as ' some of the deedest rubbish that an intelHgent editor ever shot into his wastepaper basket. If Morley prints it I shall be glad, but my respect for him will be shaken.' It was, however, printed — in the * Fortnightly Review/ June 1874 — and is now included in the volume Lay Morals. The classification of the various types of fable which he was thus led to consider probably provided the suggestion for his own exercises in the same literary form. MACAIRE This ' melodramatic farce ' marks the end of the short-lived collaboration of Stevenson and Henley in play-writing. In adapting a French play, Robert Macaire, of the early nineteenth century, they re- tained almost without change the features of their original. The work was done at the suggestion of 154 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Beerbohm Tree, but was never produced during Stevenson's lifetime. As in other instances Steven- son was his own severest critic. To Henley he wrote : * Macaire is a piece of job-work, hurriedly bockled ; might have been worse, might have been better ; happy-go-lucky ; act it or let-it-rot piece of business.' The piece has been played only three times ; twice by the London Stage Society on November 4, 1900, at the Strand Theatre, and on November 8, 1900, at the Great Queen Street (now Kings way) Theatre, and once the following year with Beau Austin {q.v.). MACPHERSON, CLUNY The chieftain of the MacPhersons, with whom David and Alan take refuge in Kidnapped, was a personage in the '45. Though his clan had fought for the Pretender in 1715 Cluny professed and per- haps intended to take the side of the Government in the rising for Charles Edward. Possibly he was not uninfluenced by his father-in-law, the notorious Simon Fraser of Lovat, whose confidant he was. But the matter was taken out of his hands by the Prince's forces, who captured him in his own house, and finally obtained the support of his clan from him. Cluny seemed anxious to excuse himself — ' an angel,' he wrote, * could not resist the soothing close applications of the rebels ' — but having given his word was thenceforth staunch in the Jacobite cause. More remarkable than his share in the Rebellion was his defiance of the Government to take him from his own country in the course of the subjection of A BOOK OF R. L. S. 155 the Highlands. When other chieftains had fled to France Cluny continued to move among his native mountains, troops after him, and £1000 offered for his betrayal. A chief hiding-place was the famous ' cage,' high on the face of a rocky mountain Letter- nihchk in the recesses of Ben Alder. Here Cluny gave safe shelter for a fortnight to Prince Charles Edward shortly before the latter escaped to France. For nine years after that, he continued to evade capture, warned of the movements of the soldiers, and communicating with his friends by his ragged clansmen. When in 1754 he crossed to France, it was on the Prince's orders to join him and to bring the remainder of a sum of £27,000 left with him after the rebelhon. There is the story of Cluny having buried large sums of the French gold that he might afterwards lay his hands on them, but Andrew Lang in * Companions of Pickle ' has shown that it was a false charge. Cluny, who died in poverty in Dunkirk two years after arriving in France, was a loyal Jacobite to the end. MANSE, THE The paper which sketches his grandfather Dr. Balfour, and the days spent at the latter's manse at Colinton, is notable for Stevenson's fanciful associa- tion of himself with his remote maternal and paternal ancestors. When he wrote ' I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land, and shouted the slogan of the Elhots,' he was recalling Dr. Balfour's grand- father, the James Balfour of Pilrig, whom he intro- duces into Catriona, and who married a grand- 156 A BOOK OF R. L. S. daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, and thus linked him with the Border clan of the Elliots and their lives of outlawry and brigandage in the disputed country between Esk and Sark, which would seem to have been in Stevenson's mind when creating the Four Black Brothers of Weir of Hermiston for a much later period. The mention of the West Indies is in refer- ence to his paternal great-grandfather, Alan, a partner with his brother Hugh in interests in the West Indies, where both died young within a few hours of each other as the result of exposure in pursuing an unfaithful servant from island to island in an open boat, a romantic tradition which it pleased Stevenson to single out for his family's history. The paper was contributed to ' Scribner's Magazine/ May 1887, and is placed in Memories and Portraits. MARGUERITE, THE See ' Davos Press.' MARKHEIM Markheim is a piece of moral allegory cast in the rich style of Will 0' the Mill, but probing far deeper levels of man's nature. His biographer records that it was the first outcome of the thoughts on dual personality which were much in Stevenson's mind during his first year at Bournemouth (1884 — cBt. 34), and found sharper and more dramatic expression the following year in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In Markheim, it would seem, his theme was the poor remnant of good in a character that had accepted A BOOK OF R. L. S. 157 evil as it came ; a character that is brought to per- ceive in the final tragedy of its life its large part of baseness and its miserable residue of good. Who or what is the supernatural influence that Stevenson causes to resolve these ill-balanced elements ? The story itself leaves the question unanswered, and therefore it is of interest to note that Sir Sidney Colvin, who knew Stevenson's mind at this time better than any one else, writes of ' the dialogue of Markheim with his other self.' Mr. Cope Comford interprets the apparition as Mephistopheles, while Sir Walter Raleigh cautiously contents himself with the phrase * spiritual visitant.' An interpretation which accords with the fable and with the train of thought which prompted it, is -that Stevenson employed the figure of the visitor as a mirror in which Markheim is made to see his soul ; with which he debates his own shortcomings. His last embrace of the only shred of good which he can grasp is marked by the * wonderful and lovely change ' in the phantom as it disappears. And so the allegory, for all its sinister form, ends on a more hopeful note than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Markheim first appeared in ' The Broken Shaft ' (Unwin's Christmas Annual for 1885), and is appro- priately placed in The Merry Men. MASSON, MISS ROSALINE Author of a brief but very comprehensive life of Stevenson issued (1914) as one of Messrs. Jack's * People's Books.' Miss Masson is an Edinburgh lady, and her early chapters are correspondingly 158 A BOOK OF R. L. S. detailed, within the limits of her space, in their draw- ing of Stevenson's earlier years. MASTER OF BALLANTRAE, THE The plan of this * winter's tale ' was conceived by R. L. S. {cBt. 37) in the icy climate of the sana- torium for consumptives by Saranac Lake in the Adirondack mountains. He had come there, in 1887, with a day or two's halt in New York, from England, after three years' almost continuous ill- health at Bournemouth. The essay, The Genesis of the Master of Ballantrae, written six years later, and included in the Edinburgh edition after his death, has told how in the cold of a winter night the story moulded itself in his mind. This Genesis will be found in The Art of Writing, but letters of the time better show how this story of fraternal hatred had taken possession of him. To Sir Sidney Colvin he wrote : ' I have fallen head over heels into a new tale. The Master of Ballantrae. No thought have I now apart from it. . . . It is to me a most seizing tale . . . the Master is all I know of the devil. I have known hints of him in the world, but always cowards ; he is as bold as a lion, but with the same deathless, causeless duplicity I have watched with so much surprise in my two cowards.' The first part was written at Saranac, and the book was ac- quired by * Scribner's Magazine ' for serial publi- cation. To the editor of Scribner's, Mr. E. L. Burlingame, R. L. S. wrote of it as ' a howling good tale,' but a month of two later he was sure ' the second part will not be near so good.' To Henry A BOOK OF R. L. S. 159 James at this stage he was regretting the design of the latter parts, not then written : ' They are very picturesque, but they are fantastic ; they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning. I wish I knew ; that was how the tale came to me however.' In April 1888 Stevenson left Saranac, and in June set sail from San Francisco in the yacht ' Casco ' on the Pacific voyages, which at last brought him to Samoa. The writing of The Master was continued at Tautira, a village of Tahiti (Society Islands), where the party made a long stay whilst the yacht was remasted, and was finally completed at Ho:..! lu. The finish- ing of the book, done whilst the earlier part was appearing, came less easily to Stevenson. In his sense of the hurried culmination of the tragedy in comparison with the firmness of the first part he anticipated the critics : ' This cursed end of The Master hangs over me Hke a gallows ... it is a difiicult thing to write, above all in Mackellarese, and I cannot see my way clear/ And again, when it was done : ' The Master has been a sore cross to me,' and ' the hardest job I ever had to do.' Still, at the time of writing, he thought it contained ' more human work than anything of mine but Kidnapped,' though four years afterwards, just as he had finished Catriona his criticism of The Master was that it ' lacked all pleasurableness, and hence was imperfect in essence.' Lord Rosebery echoed the same criticism when he declared he found the story ' unutterably repulsive — the conflict of a scoundrel against a maniac narrated by a coward.' Still, The Master, despite the brokenness of its story— always the weakest spot in l6o A BOOK OF R. L. S. Stevenson's longer workS' — sustains the sense of moving to its final tragedy more than any other of the novels. In no other perhaps is the interaction of character on character so fully developed, though Mr. Swinnerton can praise it only for its dis- tinguished scenes, and thinks its climax a collapse. In setting the last scenes about the year 1764 Stevenson chose as a background the still unsettled condition of what is now New York State after the British colonial wars against the French. The scene of the * wilderness ' is the mountain country near Lake Champlain. The Sir William Johnson with whom the expedition was undertaken was an active figure in the British conquest of Canada, and noted for his conciliation of Indian tribes. The Master ran in ' Scribner's ' from November 1888 to October 1889, and was published separately by Messrs Cassell in September 1889. It was the first of his longer books, for which Stevenson received a substantial sum. The preface, purporting to de- scribe the discovery of Mackellar's papers, somewhat after the manner of Scott, was discarded on the first issue, but was used in the final editions, and is separ- ately printed in Essays on the Art of Writing. The value of a fkst edition is now about £1. An author's edition (1888), privately printed for copy- right reasons, is much rarer, and has realized over £120. MEMORIALS See ' Edinburgh,' ' Exeter,' ' San Francisco,' ' Saranac,' ' Silverado Squatters.' A BOOK OF R. L. S. i6i MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS The essays brought together under this title are chiefly Stevenson's reflections, ten years afterwards, on the experiences and friendships of his youth. They represent a proportion of his contributions of this kind to reviews and magazines, from 1882 to 1887 (cBt. 32 to 37). The book was prepared for the press during the last few months at Bournemouth in the interval between the death of his father and his own final departure for America. As he then wrote to Henley : * Its interest will be largely autobio- graphical, Mr. S. having sketched there the linea- ments of many departed friends, and dwelt fondly, and with a m'istened eye, upon by-gone pleasures. The contract with his publishers was apparently signed just before sailing, and the brief dedication of the book, to his mother, written on board the ' Ludgate Hill ' when within sight of Newfoundland. The essays are : The Foreigner at Home, Old Mortality, Pastoral, The Manse, Thomas Stevenson, Talk and Talkers, The Character of Dogs, A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured, A Gossip on Romance, A Humble Remonstrance and A College Magazine, Memories of an Islet (Earraid), and A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas's w^ere here first issued. Some College Memories and An Old Scotch Gardener had previously been published semi-privately in Edin- burgh. All are separately treated in this book under their respective titles. The first edition of 299 pages, published in 1887 by Messrs. Chatto & Windus, is worth about 20S. i62 A BOOK OF R. L. S. MEMORIES OF AN ISLET The little island of Earraid, just off the south- west corner of the Ross of Mull, was the headquarters of the Stevenson firm for the building of the Dhu Heartach hghthouse, and there R. L. S. spent three weeks as a boy of twenty, while the work was in progress. The island became the scene of The Merry Men and of the wreck of the ' Covenant ' in Kidnapped ten or fifteen years later. The paper bearing the above title, and reviving these memories of his engineering hfe, was evidently written in 1886 [cBt. 36), for it was subsequent to Kidnapped, and was first published in Memories and Portraits. MENTONE Six months of enforced idleness at Mentone were the means of Stevenson's recovery from the state of nervous exhaustion and threat of phthisis which in October 1873, when he was nearly twenty-three, suddenly overturned the plan he then entertained of following the profession of advocate whilst con- tinuing his writings. Until the May of the following year he lived there by himself, his invalidism solaced by two visits from his friend Colvin and by the society of two Russian ladies and their children. The period was almost as much a rest of the mind from the differences with his parents, which had dis- turbed the previous twelve months, as an escape from the trying Edinburgh climate. But it darkened his hopes just when his first piece of writing (Roads) had been accepted, and explains the rather despond- ent note of Ordered South, which was written at A BOOK OF R.L. S. 163 Mentone. But in the spring of i874,..on his return, the danger proved to have been averted ; for the next three or four years he enjoyed passably good health, and in this restoration the strained relations with his parents passed away. MEREDITH, GEORGE (1828-1909) Stevenson first made Meredith's acquaintance during a summer spent at what is now the Burford Bridge Hotel at Box Hill, when he was twenty-eight and Meredith fifty. A slight sketch of their meeting, at the house of a friend, is contained in the ' Book- man ' Stevenson Number. To Henley a year or two later he wrote of Meredith as * the only man of genius of my acquaintance,' having then in mind people whom he might appropriately include in a list of forthcoming ' dedikees ' of his books. In this same letter there is a passage on ' The Egoist,' which will perhaps comfort those to whom the inter- pretation of Meredith's novels has presented diffi- culties : ' When I shall have read it the sixth or seventh (time) I begin to see I shall know about it. I had no idea of the matter — human red matter — he has contrived to pack into that strange and admirable book. ... I see more and more that Meredith is built for im.mortahty.' Meredith, on the other hand, left a sketch of R. L. S. in the shape of Gower Woodseer as that character is represented in the first few chapters of ' The Amazing Marriage.' The book was not published imtil after Stevenson's death, but in anticipating its arrival, he wrote : * Gower Woodseer will be a family portrait, age i64 A BOOK OF R. L. S. twenty-five, of the highly respectable and slightly influential and fairly aged Tusitala. You have not known that gentleman ; console yourself he is not worth knowing. ... I shall never see whether you have grown older, and you shall never deplore that Gower Woodseer should have declined into the pantaloon Tusitala.' MERRY MEN, THE A story which shows Stevenson's powder of \dvidly descriptive writing at perhaps its highest level, but one which, as a story, has been variously criticized. It was written in the Highlands in 1881 [cat, 31), the year after his marriage, as one of a series of tales of horror (' crawlers,' as he called them), planned in collaboration with his wife. Aros of the story is the tidal islet of Earraid, famous under its own name in Kidnapped ; the Ross of Grisapol is the Ross of Mull ; and Ben Ryan, Ben More. The name of the Merry Men is plainly taken from the Merry Men of Mey, as sailors call certain rocks in the dangerous channels of the Pentland Firth. In writing what he called * a fantastic sonata of the sea and wrecks ' Stevenson seems to have adopted a more complex and subtle scheme than was commonly his plan of construction, which perhaps is the reason why the tale is pronoimced good or bad by the critics accord- ing to their discernment of its motive. Years after- wards in Samoa, as reported by his biographer, he let fall a word on the genesis of the tale : * There are, so far as I know, three ways, and three ways only, of writing a story. You may take a plot and fit A BOOK OF R. L. S. 165 characters to it, or you may take a character and choose incidents and situations to develop it, or lastly, you must bear with me while I make this clear ' (here he made a gesture with his hands as if he were trying to shape something and give it outline and fonn), 'you may take a certain atmosphere and get actions and persons to express and reahze it. 1 11 give you an example — The Merry Men. There I began with the feeling of one of those islands on the west coast of Scotland, and I gradually de- veloped the story to express the sentiment with which that coast affected me.' Criticism, however, has gone further, namely, in finding in the ending of the tale a desertion of the key in which it opens. If it is true that Stevenson adopted the highly delicate method of presenting the fury of the sea not as a real thing, but as existing in the mind of the crazed islander, Gordon Darnaway, then the climax of the storm, and the manner of the uncle's death has the air of shattering this construc- tion, of suddenly exchanging an imagined for a very real horror. Stevenson felt perhaps that his opening theme suffered in the ending, for a year or two after the tale was written, he talked of providing it with a fresh denouement. No doubt he was persuaded of the bad policy for an author to retouch his work. At any rate the vigour and richness of its descriptive quahties carry it over these alleged flaws of con- struction, which, after all, are the business of the literary anatomist. The Merry Men appeared in the ' Cornhill Maga- zine,' June and July 1882. The book to which it i66 A BOOK OF R. L. S. gives its name contains also Will o' the Mill, Mark- heim, Thrawn Janet, Olalla, and The Treasure of Franchard. The first edition (Chatto & Windus, 1887) of 296 pages has a value of about £2, los. MISADVENTURES OF JOHN NICHOLSON, THE It is conceivable that but for Stevenson's writing this farcical tale his stepson would not have been the author two years afterwards of The Wrong Box, The two have a good deal in common — in style as well as in the tragico-comedy adventures with a corpse. John Nicholson is in fact one of Stevenson's ' pot-boilers,' one of the very few works of his which he let go with the feeling that it could have been better. But it was, as he wrote, ' a dam tale to order : I don't love it, but some of it is passable in its mouldy way.' This was from Bournemouth at the end of 1886 {cet. 36), just when the story had been finished for * Yule Tide ' (Cassell's Christmas Annual, 1887). The story has its personal element in its presen- tation of the discordant relation of father and son. There is nothing to suggest that Mr. Nicholson was intended for Stevenson's father, but the theological flavour of the household was of the kind which R. L. S. tasted as a youth. For the scenes of the Edinburgh night clubs he was going back only a few years. Collette's was one of the ' shebeens ' where the convivially inclined of Edinburgh citizens could obtain drink after the licensed hours. The picture is one of forty years ago, exact in its sense of the severe Edinburgh streets, and moreover, in its NO. 17 FIIiKIOl' ROW. t.UI\r.UivGll, IKl': HOME OI THOMAS STEVENSON l-KOM 1S57 10 Ills DEATH IN 1SS7 A BOOK OF R. L. S. 167 description of the * Lodge ' where the body is dis- covered. For this Stevenson appropriated the home (Dunchffe) of his school friend and subsequent commentator, H. B. Baildon. The house has since been greatly altered, no less than the suburb of Murrayfield has largely lost its rural character. The story is included in the volume Tales and Fantasies. MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY, THE This protest against the want of merriment in his fellow - students was a contribution to the ' Edin- burgh University Magazine,' February 1871 (cet. 21). It is now published in Lay Morals. MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA Stevenson spent nearly three months, September to October 1879, in what was then still the primitive Mexican town which he has chronicled in The Old Pacific Capital {q.v.). His precipitate journey, and particularly the last stage of it across the American continent by emigrant train to arrange his marriage with Mrs. Osbourne, had worn him out. He had sought an open-air cure, camping out in the Coast Line Mountains, where he would have died but for the care of two ranchers. From their charge he went down to Monterey on the bay of that name, ' a place,' as he wrote, * where there is no summer or winter, and pines and sand and distant hills, and a bay all filled with real water from the Pacific' Here he lived in the house of a French doctor, wrote most i68 A BOOK OF R. L. S. of The Amateur Emigrant, and The Pavilion on the Links, and a half of a novel, A Vendetta in the West, which he destroyed ; took a share in producing the local newspaper, ' The Monterey CaUfomian,' and became a notabihty of the little place. In his recol- lections the chief place is taken by the French restaurant and its old proprietor, M. Simoneau, to whom there are several delightful letters written from Hy^res four years afterwards. Stevenson loved an inn and the hospitable inn-keeper such as is commonly found in France, and he declared that * not one can be compared with Simoneau's at Monterey.' It was natural for him to write : ' Et vous, mon tres cher ami ? Comment cela va-t-il ? Comment vous portez-vous ? Comment va le commerce ? Comment aimez-vous le pays ? et I'enfant ? et la femme ? Et enfin toutes les ques- tions possibles ? Ecrivez-moi done bien vite, cher Simoneau. Et quant a moi, je vous promets que vous entendrez bien vite parler de moi : je vous ecrirai sous peu, et je vous enverrai un de mes livres. Ceci n'est qu'un serrement de main, from the bottom of my heart, dear and kind old man.' MOORS, H. J. A prominent American trader in Apia, with v.hom R. L. S. and his family stayed for some weeks on first reaching Samoa in the ' Equator ' in December 1889. With Mr. Moors he remained on terms of close friendship, the basis of which appears to have been chiefly their common interest in the disturbed political condition of the islands. Mr. Moors it was A BOOK OF R. L. S. 169 who negotiated the purchase of the VaiHma estate, looked after the clearing of the ground, took a share in the planning of the house, and in many ways acted as Stevenson's agent. This close connection with R. L. S. in the ways of friendship and business justifies his authorship of a little book * With Stevenson in Samoa ' (Collins' Wide World Library), which is a frankly drawn impression of R. L. S. during the last five years of his hfe by one who was previously a stranger to him. While he admired Stevenson, Mr. Moors did not idolize him. He writes of him, with evident sincerity, as he found him, and his emphatic judgment is that the Stevenson he knew was not the preacher and maker of prayers, but a very human companion. Bohemian, uncom- plaining, but upset, even enraged, by trifles ; an indefatigable worker, writing at all hours and in all places ; in high spirits, when well ; in times of ill- health, cheerfully damning the whole universe ; as good a listener as a talker, and with a genius for bringing out the best in his companions. Of Stevenson's writings, Mr. Moors, while disclaiming the right to be a critic, is equally vigorous in con- demning the collaboration which produced The Wrecker, The Dynamiter, and other books. He appears to have convinced Stevenson of the sound- ness of this judgment, for the two were to have made a trip together to Nassau Island, where R. L. S. was to have devoted himself alone to his work. The project was never carried out, for Stevenson died while Mr. Moors was away shortly afterwards in the States. 170 A BOOK OF R. L. S. MORAL EMBLEMS See ' Davos Press.' MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS, THE The paper on the ideals and quahties which Steven- son beHeved should be those of the professional writer was written during his first exile at Davos in 1880 [cBt. 30). It appeared in the * Fortnightly Review/ April 1881, and is placed in The Art of Writing. MORE, JAMES The father of Catriona is one of the most living pieces of character drawing in Stevenson. He was the third son of the famous Highland freebooter Rob Roy MacGregor. His other name of Campbell, with which he is twitted by Alan Breck, was that taken by his father at the time of the proscription of the MacGregors ; it was dropped for Drummond (the family name of Lord Perth) on his joining the latter's levies in the '45. More, Mohr, or Mhor (=big) is in reference to his height. Like his father, James was a brave fighter, but without a spark of the generosity which tradition attributes to Rob Roy. To the day of his death he was a plausible rascal, ready to serve his ends with any He or cock-and-bull story. It is easy to tell the outside doings of his life, but his secret dealings with both sides in and after the '45 are still very partially disclosed. What facts about him have come to Hght in later researches among Jacobite papers only A BOOK OF R. L. S. 171 establish his reputation for treachery. Andrew Lang in ' Pickle the Spy ' shows him to have been a spy of the Government before the '45, and pays tribute to the certainty with which Stevenson, un- acquainted with these later evidences, divined the character of the man. Early in his life James and another brother Ronald came under the pale of the law, in 1736, on the charge of a murder committed by their brother Robin Oig (q.v.). Discharged by a verdict of Not Proven, James was bound over in the sum of £200 to be of good behaviour for seven years. In the '45 he formed a corps of MacGregors from the remains of his father's band of outlaws, and fought bravely on the side of Charles Edward. He was wounded at Prestonpans, and after the defeat at Culloden was carried into the MacGregor country on a Utter. On the collapse of the rebellion he was attainted for high treason, but appears to have made terms with the Government which enabled him to retain his freedom until in 1750 he was party to an outrage which brought him into the hands of justice. This was the abduction on December 3 of Jean Key, or Wright, a young widow of some property whom Robin Oig designed to marry for her fortune. The two brothers tore her from her parents' home at the sword's point, carried her off half senseless on horseback, and compelled her to go through a form of marriage with Robin. Afterwards, on her pro- perty being sequestered by the CrowTi, James More brought her to Edinburgh, where eventually she came under the protection of the Government, and re- 172 A BOOK OF R. L. S. mained in the charge of friends until her death in October 1751. James in the meantime had been arrested as the instigator of the outrage, and was lying in prison at the time of the Appin murder, of which (as related in the chapter on that event) he sought to take advantage by proffering evidence against the accused. On his own trial in July 1752 a special verdict of the jury acquitted him of a capital crime in the ab- duction affair but, pending the debate upon it of the Lord Advocate Prestongrange, James was held a prisoner in Edinburgh Castle. Thence, however, as is told in Catriona, he made his escape to France, though whether with the connivance of the Govern- ment cannot be determined. A visit to Ireland had the ostensible purpose of raising forces for the Stuart cause, but it is certain that after reaching France James, while professing adherence to the Prince, was seeking to be an agent of the Hano- verian Government, and made the offer to entrap Alan Breck and deliver him to England, which Stevenson takes as the material for the latter part of Catriona. He was in London with offers of this kind, but the authorities judged him a man not to be trusted ' unless his life was in danger,' and he returned to France where the suspicions of his owa clan left him in destitution. His last state is re- vealed in a letter to his chief, Bohaldie, beseeching any employment to escape beggary, and asking for the loan of the Highland bagpipes on which he * would play some melancholy tunes.' A week later, in October 1754, he died. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 173 MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS— THE DYNA- MITER The only book of Stevenson's written in colla- boration with his wife, to whose powers of invention and descriptive writing the greater part of it is due. It had its origin at the time of his slow and perilous recovery from the nearly fatal ilhiess at Hyeres in the spring of 1884 [cBt. 34). Forbidden to speak and under orders to lie in darkness, the long hours were reheved by tales which Mrs. Stevenson made up for his amusement. A few months afterwards, when they had settled at Bournemouth, where Louis was * to Hve the life of a delicate girl,' these stories were drawn upon as material for a series planned on the lines of the New Arabian Nights of six years before. Though the form is broadly the same — a set of inter- dependent narratives over which the long arm of coincidence was never more widely waved — the style is notably different from that of the previous series. This is explained by the fact that only the prologue and epilogue and the tale of ' The Ex- plosive Bomb ' are Stevenson's own writing. All the rest of the book was the invention, and the actual writing of Mrs. Stevenson ; her husband's share in it consisting apparently in revisions and touches by which he was able with great facility to impress a large measure of his own style upon his wife's work. It is plain from a letter to Henley (November 1884) that the book engaged the chief part of his efforts : ' We are all to pieces in health, and heavily handicapped with Arabs. I have a dreadful cough whose attacks leave me c^tat. 90. T74 A BOOK OF R. L. S. I never let up on the Arabs all the same, and rarely get less than eight pages out of hand, though hardly able to come downstairs for twittering knees/ From another letter of the next month, it is seen that almost a quarter of the book was discarded, and its place taken by entirely fresh stories. As it was published in the following April it is obvious that this portion — the stories of The Destroying Angel, and of The Fair Cuban, and the Narrative of the Spirited Old Lady — came from Mrs. Steven- son's hand at this later stage. Discounting any afterwork by R. L. S. upon them, their imagination and vividness of description show Mrs. Stevenson to have possessed gifts in this field of writing little inferior to her husband's. In taking the baseness and futility of the methods of the dynamiter as the thread uniting the different stories, Stevenson chose a subject on which he held the strongest feelings. At the time of the Fenian outrages two or three years before he had written to his friend Colvin : ' I am in a mad frenzy about these explosions. If that is the new world ! Damn 0' Donovan Rossa ; damn him behind and before, above, below, and roundabout ; damn, deracinate, and destroy him, root and branch, self and company, world without end. Amen. I write that for sport if you like, but I will pray in earnest, O Lord, if you cannot convert, kindly delete him.' Attached as he was in the twenties to many ad- vanced social ideas, Stevenson retained an utter loathing for the principles and methods of the anar- chists, and felt very bitterly the failure of the Govern- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 175 ment to maintain order in Ireland. Moreover, whilst the pages of The Dynamiter were nearing com- pletion the death of Gordon filled him with contempt for what he regarded as the pusillanimous pohcy of Gladstone. He saw England as ' daubed with dis- honour,' and the intensity of his feelings is reflected in his dedication of More New Arabian Nights to the two police officers Cole and Cox (' in default of other great public characters ') who had shown conspicu- ous bravery in their encounters with the Irish dynamiters. Messrs. Longmans issued the book in April 1885 at IS. in green wrappers ; is. 6d. in red cloth. The value of the former is now about 15s. ; of the latter, about £2. French and Spanish translations ap- peared in 1894 and 1896 respectively. MORRIS, WILLIAM (1834-1896) The poet, artist, and craftsman is included here among men having a relationship with R. L. S. only for the reason that Stevenson a j^ear or two before his death wrote, but did not send, a letter to Morris in which, while expressing the strongest admiration of his genius, and particularly of his renderings of Scandinavian legends, joined issue with him as to the specific use of a word in a sense different from its ordinary acceptation. MOUNTAIN TOWN IN FRANCE, A An uncompleted paper on Monastier was origin- ally intended to form the opening chapter of Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, but was omitted in 176 A BOOK OF R. L. S. accordance with the idea of letting the book open on the beginning of the journey. It must therefore have been written in the winter of 1878 {cat, 28), but remained unpubhshed until 1896, when it appeared in the Winter Number of the ' Studio/ accompanied by four reproductions in facsimile of pencil draw- ings by Stevenson of landscapes in the neighbour- hood of Monastier. Of these the same issue contains a warm appreciation by Mr. Joseph Pennell in an article on ' Robert Louis Stevenson, Illustrator.' The paper is now placed in Essays 0/ Travel. MOVEMENTS OF YOUNG CHILDREN, NOTES ON The slight paper on the charm of children in action contributed to the * PortfoHo/ August 1874, has not been reprinted except in the collected works. The passage in it which describes the incident of the children at play with a skipping-rope is cited by Sir Sidney Colvin (* The Hampstead Annual/ 1902) as an instance from his own experience of Stevenson's immense restraint in translating his impressions into VvTiting. The children's play took place outside the house in Hampstead in which the two were lodging, and Stevenson, in catching sight of it from a window, was suddenly transported with extraordinary dehght. The stream of superlatives with which he called his friend to join him marked a sensitiveness to the beauty of such episodes which he deliberately held in restraint when it came to writing. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 177 MYERS, FREDERICK WILLIAM HENRY (1843- 1901) The poet and essayist, who is perhaps better known for his interest in psychic phenomena, wrote to Stevenson on the appearance of Jekyll and Hyde, criticizing certain of the psychological inventions in the story. Stevenson in his reply pleaded the haste in which the tale was written, and admitted the ' gross error ' of Hyde's speech at Lanyon's. The tidiness of Hyde's room in Soho, which Myers had evidently thought to be wrong psychologically, he explained to have been chosen in the idea that in the ' dread, weariness, and horror of the imprisonment,' he would tidy the room simply as an occupation. The letter serves to show Stevenson's consideration of the details of a work which passed through his hands with unusual rapidity. NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS Stevenson's title for these tales of imagination clearly shows what he intended their character to be. Plainly they were not meant to be reahstic. Their stilted, artificial style is out of keeping with such an object. They were evidently to be stories which are entertaining in the same way that the * Arabian Nights ' is entertaining, wdth just as httle pretence of realism. As a child in his grandfather's manse at Colinton he had devoured the eastern tales ; the New Arabian Nights, wTitten when he was twenty-eight, are a special form of literary invention which came easily from Stevenson's habit of invest- ing the most ordinary places and people with the 178 A BOOK OF R. L. S. wildest romance. The stories are peculiar in that their artificial style leaves one ungripped by the horror of adventure, such as those of The Suicide Cliib} But the artificiality was clearly deliberate ; when he wanted, no one better than Stevenson could write tales of horror — * crawlers/ as he called them — to make the flesh creep. He did in fact project a series of this kind, of which only one or two were completed. But in the New Arabian Nights it is easy to see his precise aim at a lighter effect. No doubt the pleasure in the technical problem — at once Stevenson's curse, and the source of his unequalled prose — prompted this experi- ment. Except in The Dynamiter, which was largely the work of his wife, the style hardly appears elsewhere in his writings. In a letter to R. A. M. Stevenson, R. L. S. reminded his cousin of the conception of the New Arabian Nights. ' The first idea of all was the hansom cabs which I communicated to you in your mother's drawing-room at Chelsea. The same afternoon the Prince de Galles and the Suicide Club were invented, and several more, now forgotten.' The Suicide Club was vvritten, some of it at Swanston and the remainder at Burford Bridge ; The Rajah's Diamond, at Monastier (September 1878) before starting on the journey with the donkey. The tales appeared in the issues from June 8 to October 26, 1878, of * London.' This was a weekly journal, 1 Although this story has been made into a Grand-Gnignol play ' Les Nuits du Hampton Club,' by MM. Mouezy-Eon and Armont (1909). A BOOK OF R. L. S. 179 founded only a year previously by an old colleague, R. Glasgow Brown, of Stevenson's on the * Edin- burgh University Magazine,' and in 1878 edited by Henley. ' Nobody,' writes Mr. Lang, ' ever read " London," or advertized in it, or heard of it.* It was a failure, and Stevenson's tales received the dis- tinction, so it has been stated, of accounting, in the estimation of more than one of the proprietors, for the unpopularity and short life of the journal. When separately published, however, in two volumes by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1882, a second edition was quickly called for. The first edition, issued at 12s., is now very scarce, and is valued by collectors at from £30 to £40. At the present time the volume New Arabian Nights contains also the finer short stories of Stevenson — The Pavilion on the Links, A Lodging for the Night, The Sire de Malefroit's Door, and Providence and the Guitar. NEW POEMS AND VARIANT READINGS The previously unpublished poems issued in 1918 by Messrs. Chatto & Windus are unfortunately not severally identified with the stages of Stevenson's mental development. Mr. Lloyd Osbourne in a preface has no word of the circumstances of their collection except to say that they were * discovered ' and privately printed by the Bibliophile Society of Boston. Even the two volumes of the Boston Society in the British Museum throw no light on the fact ; it is merely stated that the major portion of the poems were * unearthed ' by Mr. George S, i8o A BOOK OF R. L. S. Hellman, whose notes greatly add to the interest of the verses. The explanation would seem to be that the manuscripts were sold after Stevenson's death, and the volume afterwards compiled from the purchasers' collections. The Boston Society has, however, classified the verses according to the periods of Stevenson's life, and in very many cases has stated the date of writing. It is a pity that the English publishers should not have availed them- selves of this research. Of the poems, some are evidently first experiments which afterwards ob- tained a more perfect form : for example, ' Now When the Number of Our Years ' must have been the genesis of Requiem. Others are imitations of con- temporaries among which one detects the influence of Tennyson, whilst others again are love poems, exceeding in number the comparatively few verses of the kind issued in his lifetime. The latter, and the one or two heated declamations against social conventions are the most notable because of the further light they shed on these less famihar sides of Stevenson's personality. NOT I, AND OTHER POEMS See ' Davos Press.' NUITS BLANCHES The real experiences of his childhood's wakeful nights, which are noted in this sketch, written when he was twenty, may be compared with Young Night Thought and Windy Nights of The Child's Garden of Verses, where a more romantic image is conceived A BOOK OF R. L. S. i8i of the passers-by, for whom he waited in the small hours. The fragment was not published until in- cluded in the Edinburgh edition, and is now placed in Lay Morals. NURSES This early paper, written when he was twenty, is notable not only for the selection of the subject by one of his years, but as an example of the very few occasions when Stevenson sought to strike a note of pathos in his writings. For his sympathy with nurses the devotion of his own had given him good reason, though the modem generation of women will be inclined to smile at his youthful contention that the nurse should disappear from the ranks of domestic servants. The paper, first issued in the Edinburgh edition, is now published in Lay Morals. GIG, ROBIN The hot-headed Highlander with whom Alan Breck has his midnight contest on the pipes at Balquidder in Kidnapped, was the youngest of the five sons of Rob Roy. If he appears a less discredit- able character than his elder brother James More {q.v.), it is only that the element of treachery in the latter is absent. But Robert Oig (or the young) inherited a full measure of his father's violence. At seventeen, on the ground of a family quarrel, he murdered Maclaren of Invementy. He escaped capture, and was in fact never punished for this crime. After serving as a soldier and fighting at Fontenoy, he returned to Scotland and hved openly i82 A BOOK OF R. L. S. in the MacGregor country. His abduction of Jean Key in 1750, of which his brother James More was thought to be the instigator, is narrated in the chapter on the latter. Robin Oig eluded capture for over two years, but was eventually taken at a fair at Gartmore and brought to Edinburgh in May 1753. More than six months were allowed to pass before he was brought to trial, conceivably for the reason that his brother James was then hoping to buy his life by the apprehension of Alan Breck. But on December 24 Robert MacGregor, alias Campbell, alias Drummond, alias Robert Oig, was brought up on the charge of which his brother more than a year before had evaded the full penalties. Robin was not so fortunate. He was condemned to death, and executed on February 14, 1754. He made a better end than might have been expected from one of his turbulent nature, admitting his violence towards Mrs. Key, and showing some concern that his sentence might remove his brother James from further prosecution. OLALLA The only short story of Stevenson's having the sudden outburst of love between man and woman for its theme ; in none of the longer works even is there the same intensity of feeling. It was written at Bournemouth towards the end of 1885 [cet. 35), and appeared in the Christmas number of ' Court and Society Review ' of that year ; in 1887, placed in The Merry Men. The scenery is imaginative — Stevenson was never in Spain — and the contrasted A BOOK OF R. L. S, i8 characters of mother and daughter also are imagina- tive in the special sense, as he afterwards related in A Chapter on Dreams, that they and the indoor set- ting 01 the story came to him in his sleep. ' Here the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's chamber, the meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk and detail, as I have tried to write them ; to this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was beyond the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas ! they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me, for it arose immediately on the comparison of the mother and the daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism, in the first.' In drawing the half-witted Felipe, the repeated antics of pleasure were invented to mark the animal- ized nature — as Stevenson recalls in In the South Seas (Part iv, chap, v), on rem^arking the same trait in a youth of the Gilbert Islands, though with none of the bestial quahty of the Spanish degenerate. But Olalla did not satisfy R. L. S., as it has failed to satisfy the more fastidious of his critics. A year afterwards he wrote of it : * The trouble with Olalla is that it somehow sounds false. . . . What makes a story true ? Markheim is true ; Olalla is false ; and I don't know why, nor did I feel it while I worked at them ; indeed I had more inspiration with Olalla as the style shows. ... I admire the style of it myself more than is perhaps good for me ; i84 A BOOK OF R.L. S. it is so solidly written. And that again brings back (almost with the voice of despair) my unanswer- able ' Why is it false ? ' Mr. Swinnerton answers that he ' became too intent upon his rendering of the idea ; his literary sense took command when his knowledge failed.' OLD MORTALITY The entrance of a more solemn note into Steven- son's thought is marked by this paper wTitten at Hyeres in the winter of 1883-4 M- 33)- ^^ ^^^ Triplex, five years before, his theme had been the littleness of death in its relation to everyday human life. His own experiences in the interval had de- veloped a deeper feeling. He had had an illness that was all but fatal ; and in September 1883 he was profoundly affected by the death of his friend Ferrier, whose character and fate are the subject of the third part of the paper. The sobering in- fluence of events which then touched his own circle of friends can be seen in a comparison of these two papers. The essay is also one which provides a certain insight into the labour which Stevenson spent upon these pieces. The opening portion on the Greyfriars Cemetery in Edinburgh is evidently a finished form of The Wreath of Immortelles, written when he was tw^enty-one ; and material of the same period was sought, as his biographer mentions, in the shape of a letter to his mother * all about death and churchyards,' which had so distressed her that she put it on the fire, but which Stevenson had not forgotten eleven years afterwards. The paper ap- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 185 peared in * Longman's Magazine,' May 1884, and is placed in Memories and Portraits. OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL This paper on the httle CaUfornian town of Mon- terey iq.v.) belongs to the most anxious time of Stevenson's life, the few months which he spent in America before his marriage to Mrs. Osboume. He had not shared his project with his father, and the future held a large element of doubt for the discharge of the financial responsibilities to be newly acquired. Monterey at the time of his stay was on the point of losing the character of capital of a Mexican pro- vince, which had long survived the annexation of the country by the American Government in 1846. Its population remained mostly Mexican and Indian, and provided picturesque accompaniments to the scenic features of this coast. The religious cele- bration which R. L. S. describes with much feeling supplies the reminder of its foundation by Franciscan missionaries in the eighteenth century, but within a year or two of the date of the essay Monterey became a fashionable resort, and has largely lost the Mexican primitiveness which R. L. S. has chronicled. The paper first appeared in ' Fraser's Magazine,' Novem- ber 1880, and is now included in Across the Plains. OLD SCOTCH GARDENER, AN The sketch of the gentle Swanston gardener, written in the first instance when he was twenty for the ' Edinburgh University Magazine ' (March 1871), is the only piece of his early work which Stevenson i86 A BOOK OF R. L. S. reprinted after reaching an acknowledged place as a writer. And in Memories and Portraits, where it is purposely placed next to the paper on the Pent- land Shepherd, John Todd, he is all apologies for it : * The poor httle piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains invertebrate and wordy.' The Biblical gardener was evidently a pleasant memory of Stevenson's to the end of his hfe, so that he must even direct that in the Edinburgh edition John and Robert, namely the essay Pastoral and the present paper, should not be separated. ORDERED SOUTH The only essay in which R. L. S., during his twenty years of precarious health, wrote from the stand- point of the invalid. It was written early in 1874 {cBt. 24) at Mentone on his coming there only a few weeks before the appearance of his first piece of writing which found a place in a pubhc magazine. Although still contemplating the profession of advocate, the literary life was just opening to him. All projects, were, however, set aside by his state of ill-health, which Sir Andrew Clark pronounced to be nervous exhaustion and a threat of phthisis. He was ordered to winter in the Riviera, and accord- ingly set out by himself for Mentone, where he stayed six months. His letters from there, though many of of them vivacious, reflect now and again the ' dis- couraged spirit ' of the seeker after health. The essay appeared in ' Macmillan's Magazine ' for Ma}^ 1874. That R. L. S. felt that his homily needed A BOOK OF R. L. S. 187 some rather brighter note than resignation is shown by the addition he made to it when including it in Virginihus Puerisque in 1891. In the meantime the essay The Stimulation of the Alps, written in very similar circumstances, had marked his detachment, in all that he afterwards wrote, from his personal infirmities. OSBOURNE, LLOYD (1868- ) Mr. Osbourne was bom in 1868, and so at the time of Stevenson's marriage to his mother was twelve years of age. The society of this young stepson formed a new interest in Stevenson's Hfe which was very welcome to him, particularly in the years of ill- health which followed his return from his marriage visit to America. He provided the occasion for inter- minable games of soldiers on the floor of their Davos chalet, and for the publication of the Davos Press. The writing of Treasure Island, as is described in the chapter in that book, was undertaken for the amuse- ment of his stepson on a wet holiday. Following his education at Bournemouth and Edinburgh Univer- sity, the first evidence of Mr. Osboume's future collaboration with his stepfather is the ticking out on a typewriter at Saranac of the story afterwards published with their two names as The Wrong Box. Mr. Osbourne travelled with Stevenson to Samoa, where he became United States Vice-Consul. His share in The Wrecker and The Ebb Tide shows gifts as a writer which are scarcely sustained in the novels written after Stevenson's death, such as ' Love the Fiddler,' ' The Renegade,' ' The Motor Maniacs/ i88 A BOOK OF R. L. S. and * Baby Bullet.' With the exception of occa- sional introductions and commentaries, his relations with R. L. S. are represented in print only by a chapter in ' Memories of Vailima * (London, Con- stable, 1903) on * Mr. Stevenson's Home Life in VaiHma.' Here he traces Stevenson's standing among the Samoans, very partially, to his reputation for immense wealth, chiefly to his observance of Samoan etiquette, and to his espousal of the cause of the native king, Mataafa, in the face of the disapproval of the Great Powers. A half -joking character sketch of his stepson during the last year in Samoa is contained in a letter of Steven- son's to Sir James Barrie : ' Six foot, blond, eye- glasses — British eye-glasses, too. Address varying from an elaborate civility to a freezing haughtiness. Decidedly witty. Has seen an enormous amount of the world. Keeps nothing of youth, but some of its intolerance. Unexpected soft streak for the forlorn. When he is good he is very, very good, but when he is cross he is horrid. Of Dutch ancestry, and has spells known in the family as " Cold blasts from Holland." Exacting with the boys, and 3'et they like him. Rather stiff with his equals, but apt to be very kindly with his inferiors — the only imdemonstrative member of the family, which otherwise wears its heart upon both sleeves ; and except for my purple patches the only mannered one. Has tried to learn fifteen instruments ; has learnt none, but is willing to try another to-morrow. Signe particulicr ; when he thrums or tootles on any of these instruments, or even turns a barrel A BOOK OF R. L. S. 189 organ, he insists on public and sustained applause, and the strange thing is he doesn't seem to demand any for his stories. This trait is supposed to be unique.' PAN'S PIPES The romantic element in R. L. S. eagerly re- sponded to the mythical figure of Pan as the god of Nature. The essay shows enjoyment of the primi- tive conception in preference to the cumbrous theories of science. The sense in which he cherished the idea is shown by a passage from a letter, contem- poraneous with the writing of the essay : * There is more sense in that Greek myth of Pan than in any other that I recollect except the luminous Hebrew one of the Fall ; one of the biggest things ever done. If people would remember that all religions are no more than representations of life, they would find them, as they are, the best representations, Hcking Shakespeare.' The essay was one of the three short papers written in 1878 [cet. 28) for the short-Uved periodical * London ' of Henley's, and is placed in Vtrginibus Puerisque. PASTORAL The companion essay oi An Old Scotch Gardener iq.v.), and thus placed next to it in Memories and Portraits, is of later date. It was not published until 1887—' Longman's Magazine,' April— though very probably written earlier. To Stevenson's friendship with the Pentland shepherd may clearly be traced the adventures of the drover in St. Ives— igo A BOOK OF R. L. S. as great a piece of realism as any in his writings. John Todd had driven flocks to England in his young days, and it was in the tales of these travels, heard as a boy in the Pentland Hills, that the chapter in which Sim and Candlish guide St. Ives out of Scotland has its origin. PAVILION ON THE LINKS, THE The combined breadth of the Atlantic and the American continent separates the scene of this ab- sorbing tale of a wild bit of Scottish shore — Steven- son's first tale of any length — from the spot where it was written — Monterey [q.v.) on the Cahfornian coast. He was almost without means, for he had not attempted to share the project of his marriage with his father. His immediate future was far from certain, and he felt it necessary to turn his writings into money. To Henley he wrote : * Here- with the Pavilion on the Links, grand carpentry story in nine chapters, and I should hesitate to say how many tableaux. Where is it to go ? God knows. It is the dibbs that are wanted. It is not so bad, though I say it ; carpentry, of course, but not bad at that ; and who else can carpenter in England, now that Wilkie Collins is played out ? . . . I send it to you, as I daresay Payn will help, if all else fails. Dibbs and speed are my mottoes.' He was after- wards astonished when Leslie Stephen used it in the * Comhill Magazine ' (September and October 1880), but Sir Conan Doyle in * Mr. Stevenson's Methods in Fiction,' contributed to the * National Review,' four years before Stevenson's death, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 191 declared it to be the high-water mark of his genius, and to be enough, without another line, * to give a man a permanent place among the great story-tellers of the race.' The scene of the tale is believed to be Dirleton in East Lothian, midway between Tantallon and Gullane, familiar to Stevenson as a boy, and pictured even more vividly ten years afterwards in Catriona. In the collected works, the Pavilion is included in New Arabian Nights. PENNELL, JOSEPH (1860- ) The artist and illustrator appears among Steven- son's correspondents in reference to a book, an illus- trated ' Canterbury Pilgrimage,' which he and his wife had dedicated to R. L. S. Some years previ- ously it had been proposed that Stevenson and Mr. Pennell should make a canoe voyage of the Rhone, from source to mouth, together. Stevenson, as Mr. Pennell has said, gave up the scheme, since it was perfectly certain they would both be drowned, and the only question was — where. Mr. Pennell's high opinion of Stevenson's amateur work as an illustrator has already been mentioned in the notes on the Davos Press (q.v.). PENNY PLAIN AND TWOPENCE COLOURED, A The toy theatre which delighted his invalid days as a child of six, and afterwards absorbed his boy- hood's pocket money, was a thing still so real to the grown-up Stevenson that at thirty-four he could write to a correspondent who had sought his advice on matters of conduct : ' I gather that you are a 192 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Skeltist ; now seriously that is a good beginning ; there is a deal of romance (cheap) in Skelt. Look at it well, you will see much of Dickens. And even Skelt is better than conscientious grey back gardens, and conscientious dull, still lives. The great lack of art just now is a spice of life and interest ; and I prefer galvanism to acquiescence in the grave.' At the time of writing the paper in 1883 {cBt. 33) he had to regret that the productions of Skelt were no longer to be had. The present writer recalls a set having been included in the catalogue of a London auction sale, and his disappointment that it was not offered. Some Stevensonian perhaps had stolen a march on him. The paper first appeared in the ' Magazine of Art' (April 1884), then edited by Henley, to whom Stevenson wrote, apropos of the use of illus- trations : * The Skelt will be as like a Charles Lamb as I can get it. The writer should write, and not illustrate pictures, else it 's bosh.' Most appro- priately it forms one of the essays of Memories and Portraits. PENTLAND RISING, THE The first published work of Stevenson, written when he was sixteen, celebrated the second centenary of an event of Scottish history which is so named as to give it a closer association with the Pentland country of R. L. S. than is the fact. The first rising of the Covenanting Presbyterians against the forms and practices of the Church of England which Charles 11. sought to impose by force on the Scottish people began in Galloway, but happened to end A BOOK OF R. L. S. 193 fourteen days later at Rullion Green in the Pentland Hills, where the Covenanters were defeated. The memory of these martyrs in the Covenanting cause is preserved by a monument erected in 1738 in the place of their death ; and in the ' Preaching Field,' about a mile away, a service is held every summer in celebration of their fight for religious independence. As a boy Stevenson had begun a tale of the Rising, but on his father's suggestion the historical narrative was written. A hundred copies were printed with- out any statement of its authorship, but his father afterwards bought in as many as possible, so that the twenty-two-page pamphlet in green covers is rare, having a value of about £20 among collectors. The paper was not included in the Edinburgh edition, but is now reprinted in the volume Lay Morals. PEPYS, SAMUEL The paper on Pepys was the last of the Familiar Studies of Men and Books, written at Davos in the winter of 1880-1 [cet. 31), and published first in the ' Comhill Magazine,' July 1881. Like the earlier papers on Burns, Thoreau, and Villon, it leans more towards a disparaging presentation of its subject than is perhaps warrantable, although Stevenson in the self-critical notes prefaced to the book thought that he had been ' amply just ' to Pepys. Parts in it have been criticized as complete misinterpretations of particular passages in the * Diary.' And indeed it may be thought that whereas Stevenson pays a full tribute to Pepys as the diarist and the boyish en j oyer of life, he is cynically critical of the disparity between 194 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Pepys's secret confessions and the professed respect- ability of his hfe. Here, as in the case of Villon, any injustice of the portrait arose from a judgment into which nineteenth-century standards had too large a part. PHILLIPS, ALFRED R. The writer to whom Stevenson refers in the pre- face to The Black Arrow, as his rival for the approval of the readers of ' Young Folks/ The preface was written in 1888. Mr. Philhps must have finished many stories since that time, but only three of them are at present catalogued in the British Museum. They are * Faust — A Weird Story,' * Love and Death,' and ' A Fight for Fame,' each forming a complete issue of the ' Home Library of Powerful Dramatic Tales,' published by the same firm for which Stevenson wrote Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, and Kidnapped, PHILOSOPHY OF NOMENCLATURE, THE In elaborating the dictum in ' Tristram Shandy ' that a name inspires or depresses its owner's achieve- ments, Stevenson exhibited that sense of the fitness of a name which is among a novelist's quahfications. It is long after this paper in the * Edinburgh Univer- sity Magazine,' April 1871, that we find him revelling in the sound of names like * Jerry Abershaw,' * Ramsay Traquair,' and the name he thought most fitting to its setting, Mr. Soulis of Balweary in Thrawn Janet. The paper is now pubHshed in Lay Morals. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 195 PHILOSOPHY OF UMBRELLAS, THE The satirical quality of Stevenson's humour has its first example in this early paper contributed to the ' Edinburgh University Magazine,' February 1871, and now placed in Lay Morals. Its gentle de- rision of the umbrella as the symbol of ' all those homely and soHd virtues implied in the term, Re- spectabiHty/ is likewise a youthful expression of his own practical philosophy, which perhaps prompted him to mention the paper for inclusion in the Edin- burgh edition, for the sentiment of this paper of his twenty-first year can be traced continuously through- out his writings. PINERO, SIR ARTHUR WING (1855- ) A lecture delivered in Edinburgh by Sir Arthur Pinero in 1903 on ' Robert Louis Stevenson as a Dramatist ' is perhaps the best piece of criticism of the plays in which R. L. S. collaborated with Henley. The greatest living playwright, like other critics, can find little to commend in the Henley-Stevenson plays. Giving R. L. S. a larger share in their merits and defects than may be thought just, he sees in their lack of stagecraft Stevenson's view of the stage as a game of play, the * Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured ' of his toy theatre days. Keenly alive to the intricate elements in the making of a piece of literary art, he ignored the equally technical but altogether distinct art required of the playwright. Thus for all their beauty of words, Sir Arthur Pinero cannot find in the plays * the beauty of dramatic fitness to the character and the situation.' This 196 A BOOK OF R. L. S. contribution to Stevensonian criticism would not be included here but for the fact that after having been privately printed, it has been published by the Dramatic Museum of Columbia University (New York, 1914) with an introduction by Clayton Hamilton. PINKERTON Pinkerton in The Wrecker had his original in S. S. McClure, the American publisher, of whose energetic and apparently random methods Stevenson had had a glimpse during the few months spent in America on his second visit. PLAYS OF W. E. HENLEY AND R. L. STEVENSON The volume thus titled and published by Mr. Heinemann in 1896 includes the four pieces : Deacon Brodie, Beau Aitstin, Admiral Guinea, and Robert Macaire. Its present value is about the same as its issue price, viz. los. 6d. PRAYERS The prayers written in Samoa and used in the gatherings of the Vailima family and their native servants, were first published in the Edinburgh edition, and were issued separately in 1905, with a preface by Mrs. Stevenson. That titled ' Sunday,' and beginning, * We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favour . . . ' was read at Stevenson's burial. PREFACE TO ' THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE ' See * Master of Bailantrae, The.' A BOOK OF R. L. S. 197 PRELUDE At the head of these verses belonging to his twenty- first year, and of which a courageous rule of hfe is the motif, Stevenson had written : ' When first I began to take an interest in the poor and the sorrow- ful.' The verses are among those lately published in New Poems and Variant Readings. PRIDEAUX, W. F. (1840-1914) The late Colonel Prideaux, collector, bibhophile, and bibhologist, was the author of ' A Bibhography of the Works of Robert Louis Stevenson,' first pub- lished in 1903, and since his death issued in a second edition (London, Frank Hollings, 1917), with re- visions and additions by Mrs. Luther S. Livingston, who is assistant librarian in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, Cambridge, Mass. The late Mr. Widener possessed a great collection of first editions and rarer literature of Stevenson, and was a collaborator with Colonel Prideaux in the first compilation of the bibliography. PRINCE OTTO Stevenson's second longer work of fiction, and the greatest imaginable jump from the buccaneering story of Treasure Island with which he first came before a large pubHc. Prince Otto is difficult to classify ; it is not, as R. L. S. wrote, ' a romance, nor yet a comedy, nor yet a romantic comedy, but a kind of preparation of some of the elements of all these in a glass jar.' It is, more than anything else, a piece of Stevenson's paradoxical philosophy igS A BOOK OF R. L. S. wrought into a story which, for one thing, has a very slender interest and, for another, is all the while very near to being overwhelmed by the rich beauty of its writing. Stevenson's theme seems to be : Let us have done with this artiiical life of courts which chokes a man's healthy tastes, and is a breed- ing ground for vanity and scandal. Such is the interpretation which the story bears from his de- claration to Henley that ' the romance lies precisely in the freeing of two spirits from these court in- trigues.' The delicacy with which this motive is woven into the picture of the affairs of Otto and his princess may justify the opinion, often expressed, that the book is the touchstone for the true Steven- sonian, but it will not deter the critical reader from thinking it the least successful of Stevenson's longer works. The great charm and abundance of its literary body — perhaps the highest level of writ- ing, as writing, which Stevenson reached — over- power both its moral basis and its thin dramatic quality. The one needs to be searched for ; the other is never intense with life. Stevenson had a technical reason to proffer for the unreality of Prince Otto, viz., unsteadiness of key. It was this, as he wrote to an American friend, C. W. Stoddard, ' which spoils the book, and often gives it a wanton air of unreality and juggling with air-bells.' Its defect comes ' from the too great realism of some chapters and passages — some of which I have now spotted, others I daresay I shall never spot — which disprepares the reader for the cast of the remainder. Any story can be made true A BOOK OF R. L. S. 199 in its own key ; any story can be made false by the choice of a wrong key of detail or style. Otto is made to reel like a drunken— I was going to say man, but let us substitute cipher — by the variations of the key.' A further explanation is that, unhke his finest longer works which were begun and finished within a few months, Prince Otto was in Stevenson's mind for years. Originally it was a play ' Semiramis ' in blank verse, belonging to his very young days, when many lengthy manuscripts were finished and de- stroyed. At Monterey in 1879, as he tells in the de- dication, he had drafted the story in brief. Its title then was The Forest State, afterwards The Greenwood State ; and a letter written to Henley from San Francisco early in the next year shows that scenes and characters were then fully planned. It was put aside until the spring of 1883 [cBt, 33) at Hyeres, when, after three months of serious ill-health, he took it up with vigour. It made progress through a summer of reasonably good health, was delayed by two almost fatal illnesses in the following year, and was not finally completed until after leaving Hyeres for Bournemouth in the latter part of 1884. We have it from Sir Graham Balfour that the work hung fire in Stevenson's hands at the point where the Countess Von Rosen takes her part in the affairs of the Prince and Princess, and that R. L. S. re-wrote these chapters eight times before they satisfied him. He might well say to his friend Low that the book ' had been long gestated, and is wrought with care,' but the admission is significant of the difference 200 A BOOK OF R. L. S. between Prince Otto and books like Treasure Island and Kidnapped which came freely from his hand. On the characters, R. L. S. in a letter to Lloyd Osboume, declared that Otto was drawn from his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson. The portrait, it would seem, is only of R. A. M.'s surprising doublings and twistings in friendly controversy, and no more a full picture than is the pirate Silver one of W. E. Henley. A single trait in a friend was material enough for Stevenson in creating a character by a process of transplantation. The same method no doubt explains his confession that the demi-rep Countess von Rosen had her original in the very charming Russian lady, Mdme. Zassetsky, to whom Stevenson was indebted for much kindness during the months of his first invalidism at Mentone. The Countess, the most living figure in the Dresden- china world of Griinewald, was, according to R. L. S., one of the only two women character parts which had pleased him — an opinion given before the younger and elder Kirsties in Weir of Hermiston had formed themselves in his mind. Prince Otto was published in * Longman's Maga- zine,' April to October 1885, and in book form by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in November of the same year. It met with no particular favour, and Stevenson himself records one paper accepting it as a child's book, and another describing it as a Gilbert Comedy. Copies of the first edition are scarce and realize about ;{ii. The book has been dramatized on at least two occasions, and exists in a notable A BOOK OF R. L. S. 201 French translation by Mr. Egerton Castle (John Lane, 1896). PROVIDENCE AND THE GUITAR The delightful vignette from the fortunes of a pair of strolling actors had its originals in real life. M. Leon Berthelini, whose real (or perhaps stage) name has been given as De Vauversin, lodged for a while with his Bulgarian wife in the kitchen of Siron's inn at Barbizon when R. L. S. was there. Their poverty, as in the story, had a more pathetic side to it than the boorishness of Commissaries of PoHce and inn-keepers. Their only child had to be left in the charge of a peasant woman while they were upon their travels ; it had come by a fall, and was a hunchback. The picture is one after Steven- son's heart — the almost penniless actor unruffled amidst his misfortunes, and returning the contumely of brutish officials in the grand manner of the Count Almaviva of Beaumarchais' ' Marriage of Figaro.' The story was written in 1878 {cBt. 28), when staying at Cambridge with his friend Colvin, and on its publication in * London,' November 2 to 23, 1878, Stevenson sent the money he received for it to the ' Berthelinis.' In the collected works the story is placed in New Arabian Nights. PULVIS ET UMBRA ' A Darwinian sermon,' Stevenson wrote, he might have called this paper in which, while accepting the doctrines of Darwin which then agitated the religious world, he sought to affirm a moral motive running 202 A BOOK OF R. L. S. through the darkest chapters of creation, to be de- tected in the lowest specimens of mankind. In its large phrases and terrific effect it marks the change of his mind to the more serious cast which his friends observed in him after the long succession of illnesses which finally drove him to America in 1887. It was written soon after his arrival there [cet. 37) for the Scribner series, and of it he wrote : ' It is true, and I find it touching and beneficial to me at least.' And afterwards when the paper was published he sent a characteristic letter to a close friend (a lady) in England, whose feelings, he feared, might be hurt by it. To her he wrote : * But I find that to some people this vision of mine is a nightmare, and extinguishes all ground of faith in God or pleasure in man. . . . And I could wish in my heart that I had not published this paper if it troubles folk too much ; all have not the same digestion nor the same sight of things. . . . But yet I may add this : if my view be everything but the nonsense that it may be — to me it seems self-evident and blinding truth — surely of all things it makes this world holier. There is nothing in it but the moral side — but the great battle and the breathing times with their refreshments. I see no more and no less. And if you look again, it is not ugly, and it is filled with promise.' The paper appeared in * Scribner's Magazine,* April 1888, and is placed in Across the Plains. RAEBURN, SOME PORTRAITS BY The appreciation of the work of the Scottish artist, written in 1876 [cet. 26), on the occasion of an ex- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 203 hibition of his portraits in Edinburgh, is one of the very few papers which had to wait for pubhcation in book form. It was successively decHned by the ' Cornhill Magazine,' the ' Pall Mall Gazette/ and * Blackwood's Magazine,' and was reserved for in- clusion in Virginibus Puerisque, where it is the least in key with the other essays of that volume. The paper is notable for the superlative interest it dis- plays in the Scots judge, Lord Braxfield, long after- wards the original of Weir of Hermiston. In a letter written two daj/s before his death Stevenson ac- knowledged receiving from Edinburgh an engraving ' from that same Raeburn portrait that I saw in '76 or '77 with so extreme a gusto that I have ever since been Braxfield's humble servant.' RALEIGH, SIR WALTER (1861- ) The two elements in Stevenson's writings, style and romance, are specially the subject of a warm appreciation by the present Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. His essay, pub- lished as ' Robert Louis Stevenson ' by Edwin Arnold in 1895, was the first literary judgment of Stevenson's whole work, and has lost nothing of its value as a study of the qualities in which Stevenson's writings are pre-eminent. RANDOM MEMORIES Under this title are issued the papers on Fife and on the Education of an Engineer in Across the Plains, and the later piece, Rosa quo Locorum included in Essays of Travel. 204 A BOOK OF R. L. S. REALISM, A NOTE ON This paper on the difference between reahsm and ideahsm in hterature, which Stevenson regarded as one purely of detail, was written at Hyeres in 1883 M- 33) for the ' Magazine of Art,' where it appeared in November of the same year. ' I have written a breathless note on Realism for Henley ; a fifth part of the subject hurriedly touched.' ' Realism,' he continued in the same letter to R. A. M. Stevenson, ' I regard as a mere question of method. . . . Real art, whether ideal or realistic, addresses precisely the same feeling, and seeks the same quahties — signi- ficance or charm. And the same — very same — in- spiration is only methodically differentiated accord- ing as the artist is an arrant realist or an arrant idealist. Each, by his own method, seeks to save and perpetuate the same significance or charm ; the one by suppressing, the other by forcing detail. ... All other realism is not art at all — but not at all. It is then an insincere and showy handicraft.' The paper is now included in The Art of Writing. REFLECTIONS AND REMARKS ON HUMAN LIFE The paragraphs which make up this rather mis- cellaneous chapter on morals were apparently written (not with the idea of their pubhcation) at considerable intervals of time. At any rate they are not directly related to one another. Their time of writing is not exactly known ; apparently it was about 1878 [cBt. 28). The paragraphs are labelled: Justice and Justification ; Parent and Child ; SoHtude and Society ; Selfishness and Egoism ; A BOOK OF R. L. S. 205 Right and Wrong ; Discipline of Conscience ; Gratitude to God ; Blame ; Marriage ; Idleness and Industry ; Courage ; Results of Action. Placed among them is the fragment, written at Monterey, 1879, Dialogue on Character and Destiny between Two Puppets, in which in the form of a fable, Stevenson debates free-will and predestination. It is the passage labelled ' Selfishness and Egoism,' which was singled out by Henley in his bitter review of the Life of Stevenson as holding up the pattern of Stevenson himself : * An unconscious, easy, selfish person shocks less, and is more easily loved than one who is laboriously and egotistically unselfish. There is at least no fuss about the first ; but the other parades his sacrifices, and so sells his favours too dear. Selfishness is calm, a force of nature; you might say the trees were selfish. But egoism is a piece of vanity ; it must always take you into its confidence ; it is uneasy, troublesome, seeking ; it can do good, but not handsomely ; it is uglier because less dignified than selfishness itself. But here I perhaps exaggerate to myself, because I am the one more than the other, and feel it hke a hook in my mouth at every step I take. Do what I will this seems to spoil all.' The fragment was first published in the Edinburgh edition, and is not cur- rently issued. RETROSPECT, A This fragment, written on a visit to Dunoon in 1870 (cet. 20), is one of the earliest of Stevenson's writings which express his clear-eyed recollection 2o6 A BOOK OF R. L. S, of his childhood, the real way in which he lived again and enjoyed the past. He loves Hazlitt for this community in their experiences, and uses the words which have since become the symbol of one side of his personality — ' Et ego in Arcadia vixi.' The fragment was not published until its inclusion in the Edinburgh edition. RICE, RICHARD ASHLEY (1878- ) Professor of English Literature at Smith College, United States, and author of ' Robert Louis Steven- son : How to know him ' (Indianapolis, The Bobbs- Merrill Company, 1916), a very understanding study of Stevenson's personality and writings. Mr. Rice takes Stevenson's books as a true mirror of his life, the best of them corresponding with the best of his hopes, and in thus placing the phases of his tempera- ment and the circumstances of his career year by year against his writings produces a work which is a very penetrating character sketch, as well as a most discerning piece of literary criticism. In the latter respect it may well take the place of the volume of Mr. L. Cope Cornford [q.v), now out of print. ROADS The first piece of writing for which R. L. S. received payment in the ordinary way from a magazine. The essay, which commends the quiet, undistinguished landscape, and points the mental enjoyment of journeying here and there along country roadways, was planned whilst on the visit to a cousin, Mrs. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 207 Churchill Babington, at Cockfield Rectory, near Bury St. Edmunds in 1873 [est. 23), which was memorable as his first meeting with his lifelong friend Colvin (now Sir Sidney Colvin) and his wife, then Mrs. Sitwell. In Mrs. Sitwell he found a most sympathetic adviser in the conflicting circumstances of his life. Thus on his return to Edinburgh it is to her that he writes : ' I have finished Roads to-day, and send it off for you to see. The Lord knows whether it is worth anything — some of it pleases me a good deal, but I fear it is quite unfit for any possible magazine. However, I wish you to see it, as you know the humour in which it was conceived, walking alone and very happily about the Suffolk highways and byways on several splendid sunny afternoons. ... I have looked over Roads again, and am aghast at its feebleness.' The essay was published in the ' Portfolio,' December 1873, then edited by P. G. Hamerton, and signed * L. S. Stone ven.' This was the only pseudonym ever used by Stevenson, with the excep- tion of the ' Captain George North ' employed for Treasure Island and The Black Arrow on their serial publication. The paper is now included in editions of Essays of Travel. Its class of subject — outdoor effects and scenes — is one on which Stevenson first chiefly practised his hterary art — with great advan- tage to the charm of his later works of incident and romance. The reference in the essay to the engineer who followed Hogarth's line of beauty in laying down a road is to its author's grandfather, Robert Stevenson [q.v,]. 2o8 A BOOK OF R. L. S. ROB AND BEN; OR THE PIRATE AND THE APOTHECARY See * Davos Press.' RODIN, AUGUSTE (1840-1917) Stevenson was introduced to the French sculptor by Henley on a short visit from Bournemouth to Paris in 1886, and appears immediately to have formed as great an admiration of the man as of the artist. His letter acknowledging the gift of a cast of * Le Prin temps/ which Rodin had sent him, is in a vein of warm regard. A group of Rodin's was among the few works of art which he carried to Samoa, from which it may be thought that, at a time when Rodin had still to receive the appreciation of English critics, Stevenson shared all Henley's en- thusiasm of his genius. ROMANCE, A GOSSIP ON Although passages in this paper expressly contra- dict the statement, Stevenson's conception of ro- mance was adventure — moving incidents, threatened dangers or hidden treasure. His tales all correspond with this interpretation and, if he perceived other forms of romance, they lay outside the models which he had cherished from childhood. He was not en- tirely joking when he wrote to Cosmo Monkhouse : * To confess plainly, I had intended to spend my life (or any leisure I might have from piracy upon the high seas) as the leader of a great horde of irregular cavalry, devastating whole valleys. I can still, looking back, see myself in many favourite A BOOK OF R. L. S. 209 attitudes : signalling for a boat from my pirate ship with a pocket handkerchief, I at the jetty end, and one or two of my bold blades keeping the crowd at bay ; or else turning in the saddle to look back at my whole command (some five thousand strong) following me at the hand gallop up the road out of the burning valley ; this last by moonlight.' With this intense, if unconscious, personal bias it is no wonder that the paper was hard writing. To Henley, who appears to have suggested the subject, he wrote : ' I have certainly been a fortnight over this Romance, sometimes five hours a day ; and yet it is about my usual length — eight pages or so — and would be a d d sight better for another curry . . . it is all loose ends ; if ever I do my book on the Art of Literature I shall gather them together and be clear.' The paper appeared in * Longman's Magazine,' November 1882, and is included in Memories and Portraits. ROSA QUO LOCORUM This unfinished paper is a piece of Stevenson's hterary autobiography in its reminiscences of the imagery which, as an infant, he created for himself from the simple lines of the metrical version of the Psalms read to him by his nurse. By ' Cummy,' too, he had read to him, ' Robinson Crusoe,' The Swiss Family Robinson,' and Captain Mayne Reid, the latter, it may be thought, with some expurgation of dialogue. On account of the opinion expressed in the paper of Stevenson's order of preference for Scott's novels it is worthy of note that it was written 210 A BOOK OF R. L. S. about 1891 {cet. 41). It was not published until in- cluded in the Edinburgh edition, and is now placed in Essays of Travel. ST. GAUDENS, AUGUSTUS (1848-1907) The Irish-American sculptor was a student of his art in Paris, and a friend of Mr. Will H. Low during the years that Stevenson was making his flying visits to the latter in the capital and at Barbizon. But R. L. S. and St. Gaudens did not meet until Steven- son's arrival in America in 1887, when the sculptor immediately became a devoted admirer, and within the few weeks which elapsed before Stevenson de- parted to the Saranac sanatorium made the medalHon of him which afterwards in a modified form was chosen for the memorial in St. Giles's, Edinburgh. Originally the design was circular, and the inscrip- tion was the lines beginning ' Youth now flees on feathered foot ' (No. XL of Underwoods), which Stevenson had sent to Mr. Low in acknowledgment of a dedication of an illustrated edition of Keats's ' Lamia.' In the production of the memorial these verses were replaced (according to Mr. Low, at the dictation of the Church authorities) by the words of one of the Prayers written by Stevenson at Vailima. ST. IVES This tale of adventure, for the most part in a strain of romantic comedy, belongs to the last two years of Stevenson's life. If in respect to any of his writings it were wished, by seizing on phrases, to convict him out of his own mouth of having been guilty of a A BOOK OF R. L. S. 211 ' pot boiler,' St. Ives is the book. ' A mere story/ he wrote to Barrie, ' to tickle gudgeons and make money for a harmless family.' The sentiment is so unlike R. L. S., is so out of tune with his lifelong effort to give the world only the best of his art, that it is felt there must have been something in his cir- cumstances to account for the lowering of his stan- dard which the phrase implies. A reading of his letters, and particularly those to his closest friends written during these last two years, discloses here and there a state of despondency and anxiety such as had been foreign to his temperament until this time. Although on the whole his health in Samoa had been marvellously better than in Europe, recurrences of illness showed how insecure was his tenure of life ; a sense of failing power in his work could not be dispelled, and, like Dickens and Thackeray, he was concerned to make provisions for his family. These things plainly coloured the view which Stevenson took of St. Ives at a later stage, but as the book remained unfinished at his death, the ultimate fate which it might have suffered, had he lived to deal with it, can only be a matter for con- jecture. At any rate St. Ives was embarked on as ' a huge alleviation' of an attack of influenza in January 1893. As a relief from the physical labour of writing, the plan was then adopted, for the first time, of dictating the story to his stepdaughter, Mrs. Strong, who for a year or two had acted as his amanuensis. In this way ' Anne,' as the story was called be- tween them, made rapid progress at its beginning. 212 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Stevenson on some days dictating throughout the fore- and afternoon from notes made by lampHght in the early morning. Mrs. Strong in ' Vaihma Memories,' relates his unconscious acting of the parts of his characters, bowing and twisting his moustache as he dehvered the lines of St. Ives in the scene at Swanston cottage where he is enter- tained after his escape. Then, a fortnight later, the threatening of a hcemorrhage stopped ' Anne's ' progress. Forbidden to speak or write more than a word or two R. L. S. pencils on a slate : ' Allow me to introduce Mr. Dumbley.' To keep the story going ' Anne ' was then spelt out by Stevenson on his fingers, and at this snail's pace during several days some pages added to the manuscript. Yet with the return of better health it made slow progress ; Stevenson seems to have felt a loss of command over the narrative after St. Ives, in Chapter X., had left Scotland, and to add to his troubles, early in the following year he had to ' change the first half of it from top to bottom.' The late arrival of a book from Edinburgh showed that he had got the dress of his characters all wrong. ' How could I have dreamed the French prisoners were watched over like a female charity school, kept in a grotesque livery, and shaved twice a w^eek. And I had made all my points on the idea that they were unshaved and clothed anyhow.' Still the book failed to satisfy its author : * It is a mere tissue of adventures ; the central figure not very well or very sharply drawn ; no philosophy, no destiny. ... If it has a merit to it, I should say A BOOK OF R. L. S. 213 it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style which seems to me to suit the mail coaches and post- chaises with which it sounds all through. . . . Tis my most prosaic book.' In this mood the story was persevered in within hearing of the gunfire from the warships which were then bombarding Samoan * rebels ' into submission. Mrs. Strong tells how in the middle of the chapter of the claret-coloured chaise a body of chiefs arrived to express their thanks for the liberation from prison, which they owed to Stevenson, and to insist, as a sign of their gratitude, on the making of the road (* of the Loving Heart ') which soon afterwards formed an approach to the Vailima estate. It is perhaps not surprising that, with war at his doors and feeling ill-content with the story, Stevenson should have put St. Ives aside. It was not touched again, for with a revulsion of energy he turned again to Weir 0/ Hermiston, in which during the last two months of his life, he found himself suddenly at his highest level of inspiration. The beginning of the story, the escape of St. Ives from the Castle of Edinburgh, very probably came into Stevenson's mind, as Mr. Neil Munro has sug- gested, from his recollection of a paper in an old volume of * Chambers's Miscellany.' This is a trans- lation from the French of a * Story of a French Prisoner in England,' in which the incidents — a duel, the descent from the Castle Rock — are those of Stevenson's opening of the tale. In taking his hero then to the Pentland Hills, he was re-visiting the most famihar scenes of his boyhood. Swans ton Cottage, as everybody knows, was his coimtry home. 214 A BOOK OF R.L. S. The Hunter's Tryst was at the period of the story the meeting-place of the Sixfoot Club by which St. Ives was hospitably received. Scott and Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd) were among its frequenters. Another picture of the Edinburgh life of the time is brightl}^ painted in the escapades of the mock university of Cramond, then a solitary vil- lage on the Firth of Forth, but now almost joined to Edinburgh by houses and railway. As pictures of places these are the best parts of the book. The journeys which St. Ives makes in England have not the same air of realism, for Stevenson knew the English country-side only enough for it to appear * foreign ' in his Scottish eyes, and was just as little at home in his drawing of the rustic Rawley, whose in- cessant small talk is the least real thing in the story. But St. Ives is unique among his books in revealing Stevenson's command of pathos. Nowhere else, except in one or two essays, has he sought to invoke the feelings which are stirred by the figure of the old French colonel who has broken his parole in the hope of standing by the bedside of his dying daughter. No more than a sketch, it ranks in tenderness of feeling with the familiar masterpieces of its kind in Thackeray and Sterne. St. Ives, completed by Sir A. Quiller-Couch, ap- peared first in the * Pall Mall Magazine,' (November 1896 to November 1897), ^^^ was first published in book form by Mr. Heinemann in 1897. SALVINI'S MACBETH A review of the performance of the ItaUan actor in Edinburgh was contributed to the ' Academy/ A BOOK OF R. L. S. 215 April 15, 1876 [cBt. 26), and is now included in the volume Lay Morals. Stevenson's interest in the drama came largely from his friendship with Fleem- ing Jenkin, and the memoir on Jenkin quotes the latter's criticism of this review in the words : * You were thinking of yourself, not of Salvini.' It is the only work in dramatic criticism which can be as- cribed to Stevenson. SAMOA Stevenson first reached Apia on the island of Upolu of the Samoan Group in the ' Equator ' in December 1889, and then purchased the estate of 300 acres below Mt. Vaea, w^hich he made his home. Yet he did not settle there until his return from the cruise in the ' Janet Nicoll ' towards the end of the following year. Then for six months he and his wife lived in a four-roomed house while Vailima was building, entering on their occupation in April 1891. The house was built three miles inland from Apia, and 600 feet above the sea, its site being so chosen that no building lower down could deface the prospect of forest and sea. The name given to it by Stevenson and denoting ' Five Waters ' in the Samoan language, was chosen in reference to a stream and its four tributaries, which within the borders of the estate provided a bathing pool and a fall of some magnitude. The house was built of wood painted green with a roof of galvanized iron, and in its completed state — it was enlarged towards the end of 1892 — contained the large hall lined with Califomian redwood, which was the scene 2i6 A BOOK OF R. L. S. of many balls, dinners, and other entertainments, now to visitors, such as officers from an English or American warship, now to native chieftains and their families. It was here that he died (December 3, 1894). Stevenson's own. room was an enclosure of part of the twelve-foot verandah, which on two sides of the house extended from the upper and lower floors, furnished with military bareness, and com- municating with the library. The house was reached from Apia for the first mile by a carriage road, and thence, when Stevenson first settled there, by a mere foot-track in the very partially cleared forest between it and the town. The track was improved into semblance of a road, but never to the degree of dispensing with the pack- horses by which all goods were brought to the estab- lishmentr The last portion of it was afterwards replaced by the Road of the Loving Heart, made by chiefs of Mataafa's party, in gratitude for Steven- son's efforts towards their release from prison. The estate gained by this primitive route was a place of almost unbroken stillness, closely bordered by virgin forest, and far enough above the sea to subdue the noise of the surf on the beach. His burial-place on the summit of Mt. Vaea is a stiff chmb even from the lofty level of Vailima. The monument above the grave, built of cement and made in the Samoan style, bears two bronze plates, one with the inscrip- tion in Samoan : ' The Tomb of Tusitala,' followed by the words of Ruth to Naomi from the Samoan Bible : ' Whither thou goest I will go ; and where thou lodgest I will lodge ; thy people shall be my A BOOK OF R. L. S. 217 people, and thy God my God ; where thou diest I will die, and there will I be buried.' The other plate is inscribed with the words of Requiem from Songs of Travel. After Stevenson's death the Vailima estate was sold by Mrs. Stevenson to Herr Kunz, the millionaire banker of Vladivostock, on whose death it was ac- quired by the German Government and, on Samoa being ceded to Germany, became the residence of the Governor. Mt. Vaea, on the other hand, passed on Mrs. Stevenson's death into the possession of her daughter, Mrs. Strong, who has recorded her deter- mination to preserve the primeval surroundings of Stevenson's last resting-place. A sentimental pleasure will be felt that his grave is no longer in German soil, the Samoan group having been the first Pacific German possessions to be seized. New Zealand troops took possession of the islands on August 28, 1914. SAN FRANCISCO A paper by Stevenson in the ' Magazine of Art,' May 1883, under the title A Modern Cosmopolis, is included only in the complete edition, where it is grouped with Monterey as Old and New Pacific Capitals. It represents Stevenson's impressions of San Francisco as he knew it in the most miserable months of his life, poor, ill, and in much anxiety of mind for the outcome of his plan of marriage with Mrs. Osboume. The newness of the city, its cosmo- politan population, the contrast between rich and poor quarters are the rather well-worn topics of the 2i8 A BOOK OF R. L. S. essay which show that R. L. S.'s vitahty was at a lower ebb than his letters sought to make out. This was in December 1879. Then, and for the following two months he lived in a single room in a workman's house in Bush Street, and went for his meals to a coffee-house where * a pampered menial of High Dutch extraction, and indeed as yet only partly ex- tracted, lays before him a cup of coffee, a roll, and a pat of butter, all, to quote the deity, very good. A while ago R. L. S. used to find the quantity of butter insufficient ; but he has now learnt the art to exactitude, and roll and butter expire at the same moment.' The restaurant and the house where he lived had both disappeared before the fire of 1906 destroyed the whole of Bush Street, but the memorial erected in 1897 in Portsmouth Square in the form of a drinking fountain, surmounted by a ship in full sail, just escaped the spread of the fire. His second visit, nine years afterwards, to join the ' Casco ' was in very different circumstances, and the Occidental Hotel, Montgomery Street, is pointed out as the place where he and his party stayed while the pre- parations for the Pacific voyage were completed. SARANAC A wooden house adjoining the sanatorium for con- sumptives near to Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains was Stevenson's home from October 1887 to April 1888. The fact is commemorated by a tablet erected by the Stevensonian Society of America. Despite the severity of the climate — the temperature would fall thirty degrees below zero A BOOK OF R. L. S. 219 — his health showed some improvement, and in the resident physician, Dr. Edward Livingstone Trudeau, who at last himself died from consumption, he found a congenial companion. Dr. Trudeau's auto- biography (New York, Doubleday Page, 1916) con- tains a chapter devoted to the author's acquaintance with R. L. S. SATIRIST, THE One of the earliest pieces of Stevenson's writings which have been pemiitted publication. It belongs to about his twentieth year, and its theme — of look- ing for defects of character — may be compared with the passage in the life of Fleeming Jenkin, whose over-kindly judgments he contested with the view that * we must know the world as it was, not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows.' First published in the Edinburgh edi- tion, the paper is now included in the volume Lay Morals. SCHWOB, MARCEL (1866-1905) The brilliant young French scholar and writer, authority on Villon, and translator of Shakespeare, was one of the first of his country to appreciate the artistry of Stevenson's work. His notice of R. L. S., contributed to the * New Review,' February 1895, is notable for its emphasis of the quahty of rMisme iniel, romantic exaggeration, which makes his char- acters so brilliantly alive. Marcel Schwob had occasion afterwards to experience the effect of this faculty himself, for in 1902 he visited Samoa, and 220 A BOOK OF R. L. S. confessed that the spell of enchantment which Stevenson had woven for him was broken by a sight of the reality. Schwob's early death at the age of thirty-nine removed perhaps the most talented student of English thought and literature and a writer who applied himself, in his work * La Guerre Commerciale ' and ' Le Danger Allemande,' to demonstrating the efforts of Germany at industrial supremacy. SCRIBNER, CHARLES (1854- ) The head of the American book and magazine firm, founded by his father in 1846, was the first publisher to pay Stevenson relatively large sums for his writ- ings. For each of the twelve articles in ' Scribner's Magazine ' in 1888 fjbo was paid, an income which Stevenson in letters to his friends variously com- puted (from the American currency) at £500, £600, and ;f720 per annum. Messrs. Scribner contracted with him to publish everything of his in America, but in utter absence of mind he entered also into an undertaking with McClure's. His self-reproaches for an act, commercially unpardonable and entirely opposed to his sense of honour, were bitter, but Mr. Scribner was quick to recognize the mental pre- occupation which had occasioned it, and thenceforth Stevenson's relations with his firm continued until his death to be of the most cordial character. The payment by Messrs. Scribner of a handsome sum for the rights of serial publication in The Master of Ballantrae was the beginning of the large income which Stevenson afterwards derived from America. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 221 The firm became, and still is, the chief publishers of his works in the United States. SPIARP, WILLIAM (1856-1905) The chapter on ' The Country of Stevenson ' in Sharp's * Literary Geography ' (London, Pall Mall Press, 1907) is remarkable for a picture of R. L. S., as seen at Waterloo Station, probably when he was about thirty years of age. In the transformation of Stevenson's almost ragged appearance on recognizing the friend who was waiting for him Sharp saw the counterpart of the variety in his writings. SHELLEY, SIR PERCY AND LADY The son and daughter-in-law of the poet, to whom Stevenson dedicated The Master of Ballantrae, be- came close friends of his during the years at Bourne- mouth. With Sir Percy he discovered common interests in yachting and the stage, and the former's amateur photography has furnished a portrait of Stevenson at this time of his life, which is evidently a characteristic one, even though it justifies him in his complaints of the ' scandal-mongering sun.' Lady Shelley claimed to discern in R. L. S. a facial resemblance to the poet as well as a similarity of genius, and the fancy was an element in her regard for him. Of her husband, when news of his death reached him in Samoa, Stevenson wrote : ' He had a sweet, original nature. I think I hked him better than ever I should have his father. ... If he had not been Shelley's son, people would have thought more of him ; and yet he was the better of the two, bar verses.' 222 A BOOK OF R. L. S. SILVER The bland villain of a sea-cook in Treasure Island. The conception of a cripple dominating his fellow seamen was drawn from the physical infirmity of W. E. Henley (q.v.), to whom R. L. S. wrote at the time when Treasure Island had been accepted for issue as a book : ' I will now make a confession. It was the sight of your maimed strength and master- fulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island. Of course he is not in any other quality or feature the least like you ; but the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was taken from you/ SILVERADO SQUATTERS, THE The story of Stevenson's honeymoon, if so con- ventional a word can be used of him. He was married to Mrs. Osbourne in San Francisco in May 1880, and with her spent the June and July on an adventure which was hardly prudent for a man who three months before had been prostrate with in- cipient consumption. But their excursion was to the mountains on the Cahfomian coast some fifty miles north of San Francisco. His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, then twelve years old, was of the party, and is ' Sam, the Crown Prince ' of the royal famity of Silverado. Their way lay through the Napa valley, then a highway of stage coaches, but now an electric tram route connecting Calistoga with Mount St. Helena. The site of the deserted mining shanty where they lived has been marked by a memorial stone in the shape of an open book with A BOOK OF R.L. S. 223 the inscription : ' This tablet, placed by the Club women of Napa Country, marks the site of the cabin occupied in 1888 by Robert Louis Stevenson and bride, while he wrote " The Silverado Squatters/' ' followed by the quotation : ' '* Doomed to know not Winter, only Spring, a being trod the flowery April for a while, took his fill of music, joy of thought and seeing, came and stayed and went, nor ever ceased to smile." R. L. S.' The quotation is from In Menioriam, F. A. S. The women admirers of Stevenson in the Napa valley err in a trifle. R. L. S. did not write the book until after his return to Europe— at Davos early in 1882 {cet. 32). It was for the ' Century Magazine,' in which it appeared in 1883, and was the first work of importance done for publishers in America, where afterwards his chief financial harvest was reaped. But at Davos, cor- recting Silverado proofs, he wrote : ' as usual penni- less — but penniless ; still, with four articles in hand and the £100 for Silverado imminent, not hopeless.' The latter part he thought much the better ; writing to Sir Sidney Colvin, who had read the earlier chapters : ' The good stuff is all to come —so I think. "The Sea Fogs," "The Hunter's Family," "Toils and Pleasures " — &^//^s pages.' Like nearly all Stevenson's works, it was revised and re-revised ; in a spell of better health he would re- shape what he had written when in a lower state. His view of the effect of this habit upon his work is shown in the lines to Will H. Low : ' Ill-health is a great handicapper in the race. I have never at 224 A BOOK OF R. L. S. command that press of spirits that are necessary to strike out a thing red-hot. Silverado is an example of stuff worried and pawed about, God knows how often, in poor health, and you can see for yourself the result : good pages, an imperfect fusion, a certain languor of the whole. Not, in short, art.' Nevertheless Mr. Swinnerton, in his ' Critical Study,' ranks it higher than the earlier travel books of the canoe voyage and the Cevennes, on account of its almost entire freedom from pose — the pure draw- ing of effects and incidents instead of that of the author among them. He marks it as the 'emer- gence of a new Stevenson,' chastened by the hard- ships of the feverish journey to America. Popular taste, on the other hand, bestows its favour on the Travels with a Donkey. The Silverado Squatters was issued by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1883. The original edition has realized about £2 during the last year or two. SIMPSON, MISS EVE BLANTYRE (1856- ) Miss Simpson is one of the few writers on Steven- son who moved intimately in his home circle, as he did in hers. She knew his parents well, and as her brother Sir Walter Simpson {q.v.) was one of Steven- son's closest friends, when both were well on in their teens, Stevenson was constantly in and out of her father's house. Hence her book ' Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days ' (London, Hodder & Stoughton, i8g8) is probably the truest picture of R. L. S. when he was a youth at home which is A BOOK OF R.L. S. 225 preserved for us. Another of her books is a brief character sketch entitled * Robert Louis Stevenson ' (Edinburgh, T. N. FouHs, 1906), and a third, ' The Robert Louis Stevenson Originals ' (Edinburgh, T. N. Foulis, 1912), in which are identified real people and places from which Stevenson drew in the novels and essays. The author of many shorter contributions to Stevenson literature, Miss Simpson is one of the few surviving friends who knew R. L. S. intimately whilst he was in Europe. SIMPSON, SIR WALTER GRINDLAY (1858-1898) The ' Cigarette ' of The Inland Voyage was a stolid, humorous Englishman, the son of the Sir James Simpson (the discoverer of chloroform as an anaes- thetic), and several years Stevenson's senior. In- tended for a mercantile career, he was recalled from Egypt on the death of his elder brother, went to Cambridge, and on his father's death and his suc- cession to the baronetcy, found himself a fellow student of R. L. S. for the bar. Thence for ten years in Edinburgh and on the Continent they were close companions, the sharers of many travels beside that of the two canoes. * The Bart,' as he was known, was the heavyweight of Stevenson's Edin- burgh friends. ' His,' says R. L. S., 'was the slow fighting mind.' He is Athelred in Talk and Talkers, the companion who would ' wrestle with a refractory jest for a minute or two together, and perhaps fail to throw it in the end.' But in their travels Sir Walter's well-groomed person and distinguished appearance were the means of saving Stevenson 226 A BOOK OF R. L. S. from many a dilemma into which his disreputable dress would have brought him. The reader will recollect one such occasion related in the Epilogue to an Inland Voyage. The practical jokes of these early days find a sympathetic narrator in the sur- viving sister of the ' Cigarette/ Miss Eve Blantyre Simpson, whose ' Stevenson Originals ' contains a portrait of her brother. SIRE OF MALETROIT'S DOOR, THE The short story attracted Stevenson's genius during the four years of passable health which followed his first close acquaintanceship with France when he was five-and-twenty. Moreover, his random travels of this period led him much to France, and a wide reading of French literature of the fifteenth century, for the purpose of historical portraits, gave him the material for his first and perhaps very finest short story, the Villon piece, A Lodging jor the Night. The Sire of Maletroit's Mousetrap, as it was first called, was his second excursion into this new field, in which he chose the same fifteenth-century setting, but turned from squalid realism to romantic comedy for his theme. En route in August 1877 (c^t. 27) for Penzance, where it was re-written, he thought it * a true novel in the old sense ; all unities preserved, moreover, if that 's anj^thing, and, I believe, with some little merits ; not so clever perhaps as the last (A Lodging for the Night), but sounder and more natural.' It is worthy of note that in this and the later short stories. The Treasure of Franchard and Providence and the Guitar, v.'hich owe their inspiration A BOOK OF R. L. S. 227 to his French experiences, Stevenson held aloof from the element of horror in which afterwards he felt his strength lay. The two latter in particular — which were studies from hfe — no less than the two books of travel in France reflect his consistent view of France as a cormtry of pleasant places and people, where he was infinitely more at home than in England. The Sire of Maletr oil's Door appeared in ' Temple Bar,' January 1878, and is placed in the New Arabian Nights. A one-act dramatization of it has been done by Mr. A. E. W. Mason under the title * Blanche of Maletroit ' (Capper & Newton, 1896). SITWELL, MRS. FRANCES The lady to whom R. L. S. owed a great deal in the way of sympathy and encouragement in the difficult years of misunderstanding between himself and his parents, is now Lady Colvin. The first meeting of Stevenson and his future lifelong adviser came about from Mrs. Sitwell's suggestion to Sir Sidney (then Mr.) Colvin that he should visit the home of Mrs. Churchill Babington (a cousin of R. L. S.'s) before the ' line young spirit ' had left. The phrase implies Mrs. Sitwell's understanding sympathy with R. L. S. in the circumstances which forced him to give pain to his parents if he were not to resign much of his cherished revolt against the religious behefs and social conventions of his home circle. These were his years, the early twenties, of intense impetuous thought, and in the critical separation from his parents which they brought he found in Mrs. Sitwell, as Sir Sidney Colvin has 228 A BOOK OF R. L. S. said, * an inspirer, consoler, and guide/ His many letters during his six months' isolation at Men tone exhibit the confidence he felt in sharing his thoughts with her, and in being the recipient of her advice. His own turn as comforter came afterwards in the spring of 1881 when Mrs. Sitwell spent some months at Davos with her son, who was dying from rapid consumption. The lines In Memoriam, F. A. S., which form No. XXVII. of Underwoods, express the consolation which R. L. S. of all people could feelingly offer. SLATER, J. HERBERT Editor of * Book Prices Current ' and author of a number of books on bibliographical subjects. Mr. Slater has compiled a bibliography of Stevenson's complete works (London, G. Bell & Sons, 1914). This volume contains particulars of the first publi- cation of Stevenson's writings in book or pamphlet form ; of successive editions of interest, and of prices paid during recent years by book collectors. Values of the first editions given in these pages are quoted from Mr. Slater's Bibliography or from recent issues of ' Book Prices Current.' SOMERSET, IN MORE NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS See ' Stevenson, R. A. M.' SONGS OF TRAVEL The collection of verses issued after Stevenson's death were many of them written during the South A BOOK OF R. L. S. 229 Paciiic cruises of 1888-91 [cet. 38 to 41) and, as issued first in the Edinburgh edition, and subsequently under the above title by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1896, are in many instances identified with the places of their author's travels. With the earlier poems of Underwoods and the Ballads, they are included in the ' Collected Poems ' of the same publishers. SOUTH SEA CRUISES Apart from journeys by mail and regular steam- ship service, Stevenson's travels in the South Seas were made in three voyages during the years 1888 to 1890. The first of these was from San Francisco in the ' Casco,' June 28, 1888, first to Nukahiva, in the Marquesas group, the place of Hermann Melville's * Typee.' Here the party, which included his mother, spent four weeks, then twelve days at Taa- hanka on the isolated island of the group, Hiva-oa ; thence through the Paumotus group, where fourteen days were spent at Fakarava, to Tahiti in the Society Islands. After a short stay at Papeete and Taravao, three months were spent inland at Tautira. Hono- lulu was reached on January 24, 1889. The second voyage in the schooner ' Equator,' like- wise occupied almost exactly six months. Leaving Honolulu on June 24, 1889, their course lay to the Gilbert group, where one month was spent on the island of Butaritari, a visit paid to Nonuti, and a stay of two months made on King Tembinok's island of Apemama. Samoa was reached on December 7. 250 A BOOK OF R. L. S. The third cruise on the screw steamship * Janet Nicoll/ begun at Sydney in April 1890, and ending in August at Noumea in New Caledonia, took Stevenson and his wife and stepson to a much greater number of islands in the South Pacific, though the opportunities for observing island life were limited by the shortness of the vessel's calls. But the cruise took them first to Samoa, then eastward to the isolated islands of Penrhyn, Manikiki, Suwarrow, and Nassau, thence through the Tokelau and ElHce groups, again through the Gilberts to the Marshall Islands, returning through the Gilberts to New Caledonia, where Stevenson let his wife and stepson proceed to Sydney, to follow them after a week at the French Settlement. The cruise did not prove of the interest of those in the two sailing vessels when the party was at liberty to choose its course, and the time to which its visits could be prolonged. Stevenson could even write of it that * hackney cabs have more variety than atolls,' but the voj^ages became a less wearisome experience from the company of the three shipmates, Harry Henderson, Ben Hird, and Jack Buckland, to whom Island Nights Entertainments is dedicated. SOUTH SEAS, IN THE When Stevenson, with his mother, wife, and stepson, sailed from San Francisco in the ' Casco,' he carried with him a commission from the McClure publishing syndicate for a series of letters on his travels in the Pacific Islands. The sum offered — Mr. Moors says it was 10,000 dollars (;f200o) for fifty letters, double A BOOK OF R. L. S. 231 what Stevenson asked — was one inducement to the purchase of the ' Casco/ though the voyage had previously been planned as one more struggle, for reasonable health, which should be decisive for good or ill. A cure of his malady or death at sea were the alternatives recognized in starting out for the new world of Pol}Tiesia. The book, as first issued in the Edinburgh edition after Stevenson's death and as now published separ- ately, is only a half of the chapters supplied to the McClure syndicate, and a still smaller part of a work on the islands upon which Stevenson bestowed an immensity of labour, but which he finally abandoned. He was in fact overwhelmed by the wealth of material presented to him in these voyages, and became con- vinced that he should deal with it in a way very different from that which, as can be understood, the syndicate had in mind when commissioning the ' letters.' Letters surely they were to be, with as much R. L. S. as South Seas in them. Instead, he conceived the idea of making them a serious study of the customs and languages of the island peoples and of keeping the incidents of his travels, impres- sions of scenery, companionship with quondam cannibals almost entirely out of them. Could his wife have had her way this scheme would have been cast aside at the oustet. From the first port of call which they reached in the ' Casco ' she wrote begging their friend Colvin's influence against it : ' Louis has the most enchanting material that any one ever had in the whole world for his book, and I am afraid he is going to spoil it all. He has taken it into his 232 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Scotch Stevenson head that a stern duty Hes before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing, comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different peoples, the object being to settle the question whether they are of common Malay origin or not. Also to compare the Protestant and Cathohc missions, etc., and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves. And I believe there is no one hving who has got so near to them, or who understands them as he does. Think of a small treatise on the Polynesian races being offered to people who are dying to hear of Ori a Ori, the making of brothers with cannibals, the strange stories they told, and the extraordinary adventures that befell us. . . . What a thing it is to have a ' man of genius ' to deal with. It is like managing an overbred horse. Why, with my own feeble hand I could write a book that the whole world would jump at!' The wisdom of this judgment, which was also afterwards that of the public, came at last to be ac- knowledged by Stevenson, but not until with an infinity of labour he had fulfilled his contract with the American syndicate, and had seen the futility ot his self-imposed task. On the ' Janet Nicoll,' the screw steamer which took them on their third voyage among the islands, the earlier letters were written ; on the return to Sydney he was ' waist deep ' in ' the big book on the South Seas, it ought to be , and shall ' ; back, in November, to Samoa, where the vfe**v- «t< r« .tesSMfe^sc^Vs .»5>.v*«;. >.,^«S«l!- " ♦! ^- ,- s L. STEVENSON AT THE AGE OF 40 A BOOK OF R. L. S. 233 Vailima estate was in process of being cleared, his problem was ' to get all this stuff jointed and moving ' ; some months later there is the admission of the * acceptation of a bargain quite unsuitable to all my methods/ and at last in March 1891 : * I cannot fight longer; I am sensible of having done worse than I hoped, worse than I feared ; all I can do is the best I can for the future and clear the book, Uke a piece of bush, with axe and cutlass.' In the South Seas, as now available to the reader, is the result of this drastic pruning and selection. The earlier parts, those on the Marquesas and Paumotos, or low or atoll islands, most definitely mark Stevenson's original intention ; those on the Gilberts, with their picture of the king Tembinok, are more in the personal strain of R. L. S., and are thus accepted as the most successful part of these writings. But the things most to be regretted about them is their omissions ; nothing of Stevenson's long stay at Tautira as the guest of the chief Ori a Ori, nor of his visit to the leper settlement of Molokai. His letters to friends in England, and the extracts from his journal in the ' Life ' do something to fill in these gaps, but not in proportion to the interest of the subjects. Nevertheless tipie has in a measure re- versed the first unfavourable reception of these South Sea chapters, the matter of which is more suited to book form than to serial pubhcation ; if less picturesque and personal than Travels with a Donkey, critics have'^ praised them for that very reason ; and so great a writer as Mr. Conrad, accord- 234 A BOOK OF R. L. S. ing to Sir Sidney Colvin, does not share the view of those who place them among the lesser of Stevenson's works. The largest number of the original letters ap- peared in the ' New York Sun ' and other American newspapers ; in England a shorter series was pub- lished in ' Black and White,' February to December 1891. Following the inclusion of a selected thirty- five chapters in the Edinburgh edition (1896), the first English issue is that (with a map) by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1900 at 6s., now worth about los. It had appeared in America in 1896. STEPHEN, LESLIE (1832-1904) As editor of the ' Cornhill Magazine ' from 1871 to 1882 the eminent biographer and critic was an encourager of Stevenson as he was of other writers, such as Henley, Henry James, and Mr. Edmund Gosse, who were among his contributors. His essay on Stevenson as a writer, included in * Studies of a Biographer ' (London, Duckworth, 1902), and separ- ately issued by Messrs. Putnam, is a most under- standing criticism ; responsive to the rein which R. L. S. gave to his temperament, yet judicial in its estimate of his failings as a novelist. In the essays he notes above all ' the genuine ring of youthful enthusiasm,' not the ripe thoughts of Lamb or Montaigne, but * a gallant spirit combined with extraordinarily quick and vivid sympathy.' ' The essays,' as he points out, ' define the point of view adopted by the storyteller.' In the novels Stevenson, with irrepressible youth, pursues adventure when he A BOOK OF R. L. S. 235 might have done more to put before the reader * the very age and body of the time.' STEVENSON, ALAN (1807-1865) The eldest son of Robert Stevenson [q.v.), Hke the youngest, Thomas, father of R. L. S., left only one son, viz., R. A. M. Stevenson (q.v.). Alan, in the course of a distinguished professional career, was the builder of the Hghthouse * Skerryvore,' after which R. L. S. named his house at Bournemouth. The erection of this work on a reef off Tiree occupied six years, from 1838, and was one of the most notable triumphs of the family's engineering genius. STEVENSON, FANNY VAN DE GRIFT (1838?- 1914) From the evidence of many of his friends it is known that Stevenson married the one woman in the world for him. The wife whom he chose from the inn company at Grez in an accession of the suddenest attachment was a woman of exceptional strength of character, and became a partner of his hfe such as fate gives to few men. At the time of their marriage in San Francisco, Stevenson was in his thirtieth year, his wife about twelve years older. The birth of Austin Strong to her daughter in the following year made her a grandmother. Her first marriage, to a Mr. Samuel Osbourne, had taken place when she was about nineteen, and for some seven or eight years before obtaining a divorce she had been separated from her husband. To her R. L. S. owed much more than the most solicitous 236 A BOOK OF R. L. S. care in the ten years of illness which followed their return from America, and in the subsequent wander- ings in the South Seas. His trust in the literary judgment of this ' critic on the hearth ' became a decisive influence in his work, and Thomas Stevenson was so convinced of his daughter-in-law's instinct in this respect that before his death he obtained his son's promise that he would * never publish anything without Fanny's approval.' This reliance on his wife extended to other matters, as when Mr. McClure, who relates the incident in his ' Autobiography,' could not obtain Stevenson's decision to sell certain rights of publication until Mrs. Stevenson had given her consent. In ordinary business affairs and the handling of money she was scarcely less of a child than her husband. In addition to their collaboration in More New Arabian Nights, a play. The Hanging Judge, was jointly written at Bournemouth. It has never been published or performed, but the outlines of its plot are given by Sir Sidney Colvin in his notes on Weir of Hermiston. Of Mrs. Stevenson's own admirable gift of descriptive writing there is only the volume ' The Cruise of the " Janet Nicoll " ' (London, Chatto & Windus, 1914), a record of the third voyage among the Pacific Islands. The tribute paid to her by Stevenson in the verses in Underwoods and in the dedication to Weir of Hermiston may be supplemented by a sketch contained in a letter pressing J. M. (now Sir James) Barrie to visit them in Samoa : ' She runs the show. Infinitely little, extraordinary wig of grey curls, handsome waxen face like Napoleon's, insane black eyes, boy's hands. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 237 tiny bare feet, a cigarette, wild blue native dress, usually spotted with garden mould. In company manners presents the appearance of a little timid and precise old maid of the days of prunes and prisms — you look for the reticule. Hellish energy ; reheved by fortnights of entire hibernation. Doctors everybody, will doctor you, cannot be doctored her- self. The living partisan. Imaginary conversation after your visit : "I like Mr. Barrie. I don't like anybody else. I don't like anybody that don't like him. When he took me into dinner he made the wittiest remark I ever heard. * Don't you think,' he said, * the old-fashioned way, etc' " Is always either loathed or slavishly adored — indifference im- possible.' On Stevenson's death she made her home in her native country at Santa Barbara, Cali- fornia, dying near there on February 18, 1914. A sentence in her will marks a strain in her character co- existent with the great tenderness for those to whom she was attached : * To Katharine Durham Osbourne (a daughter) of incredible ferocity, who lived on my bounty for many years, at the same time pursuing me with malicious slander, I leave five dollars.' STEVENSON, JEAN The wife of Robeit Stevenson, and thus R. L. S.'s grandmother on his father's side, is in part the original of Mrs. Weir in Weir of Hermiston. The reader may compare the sketch of her in A Family of Engi^ieers with the character in the unfinished novel : * My grandmother remained to the end devout and un- ambitious, occupied with her Bible, her children, 238 A BOOK OF R. L, S. and her house ; easily shocked, and associating with a clique of godly parasites. . . . The cook was a godly woman, the butcher a Christian man, and the table suffered.' This wife of his grandfather figures in an interesting chapter of the history of the Stevensons. She was one of the two daughters of a merchant-burgess of Edinburgh, Thomas Smith, twice a widower before, in the year 1786, he married the widow of Stevenson's great-grandfather Alan, who had died in the West Indies. Not only did the widow of Alan find a husband in the Edinburgh merchant, but she contrived a match between her son Robert and her stepdaughter Jean. The hus- band of Jean Smith became a partner with his father-in-law in the business of providing oil-lights in place of coal fires in lighthouse illumination, and from this beginning largely established the pro- fession in which the Stevensons have since been engaged. STEVENSON, MARGARET ISABELLA (1829- 1897) Stevenson's mother was the youngest daughter of Rev. Dr. Lewis Balfour {q.v.). Although her own ill-health during the first ten years or so of her married life made it necessary to entrust the young Louis largely to the care of his nurse, her devotion to her son is marked by the diaries in which she recorded ever}^ detail of his early years. His boy- hood w^as shared with her to an extent above the average, in the visits she paid to the Continent on account of her own health. And when after his A BOOK OF R. L. S. 239 father's death, Stevenson set out to the Pacific, his mother, in her sixtieth year, accompanied him first to America, and then in the * Casco ' to Honolulu. Returning to Scotland she went out to Samoa in 1891, stayed two years, and after a second return to Edinburgh rejoined her son at Vaihma six months before his death. Mr. Moors mentions the effect of the presence of this * daughter of the manse ' on the formal religious observances of the Vailima household. Stevenson became a regular attendant at church to please her, and during her first residence instituted morning prayers in Samoan-English. Of these travels Mrs. Stevenson has left a record in two volumes of letters published after her death under the editorship of Marie Clothilde Balfour. The first of these is ' From Saranac to the Mar- quesas ' (London, Methuen, 1903), and is the story of her journey with her son and his family to New York and Saranac, and thence from San Francisco in the ' Casco ' on the first cruise. That part of it which tells of their stay at Tautira as the guests of the native chief Ori a Ori does something to fill a gap in Stevenson's own story of his Pacific travels. The second series is the ' Letters from Samoa ' (London, Methuen, 1906), written during the years 1891-95. Both series present the picture of a sweet, if straight-laced lady accepting with some reserve entirely fresh conditions of life. If there is less of R. L. S. in them than one would wish, it is to be re- membered that they were written, without the idea of pubHcation, to her sister. Miss Jane Balfour, and that the chief interest of the two was in the res- 240 A BOOK OF R. L. S. toration of his health, on which subject the mother is unremitting in her reports. She survived her son only two years, ending her life with his name on her lips. Her elder sister had come to see her, and was about to take her hand when she exclaimed ' Louis, I must go,' tried to get up, but sank into an unconsciousness in which she died. STEVENSON, ROBERT (1772-1850) The grandfather, who was the founder of the Stevenson firm of lighthouse engineers, died four months before the birth of R. L. S. In the year 1807 the partnership between him and his father- in-law, Thomas Smith, from whom he obtained his introduction to the profession, was dissolved, and Robert Stevenson became sole engineer to the Board of Northern Lights when thirty-five years of age. His most notable piece of work is that which he undertook immediately on his appointment, viz., the building of the Bell Rock lighthouse on the Inch- cape Rock off the mouths of the Firths of Tay and Forth. R. L. S. in A Family of Engineers has drawn a picture of the difficulties of the task. At low water a third of the rock is covered ; at a little more than half -flood * the seamless ocean joins over the reef,' and at high winter tides the rock is sixteen feet under the sea. Considering that the work had to be sus- pended in the months from October to February, and was done without the aid of steam power, the building of the tower in four years was a great triumph for its engineer. For a further thirty-five years Stevenson's grandfather led a life of prodigious A BOOK OF R. L. S. 241 energy in his profession of lighthouse and harbour engineer. He was an autocratic administrator, stem in his requirements from the hghthouse- keepers, but beloved for his unwearying solicitude for their material wants. A record of his professional work by his son David was published in 1878, and the concluding part of Stevenson's unfinished life of the family is a somewhat abridged and edited version of the * Account ' of the building of the Bell Rock which Robert Stevenson, in the intervals of his profession, took fourteen years to write. STEVENSON, ROBERT ALAN MOWBRAY (1847- 1900) The concentrated purpose which made R. L. S. a writer seems to have been the missing faculty in his equally talented cousin. ' Bob,' as he was known to his friends, was the only son of Alan Stevenson, and R. L. S.'s senior by three and a half years. The greater part of his life was spent in the practical study of painting ; it was not until he was nearly forty that he found the vocation of art critic, in which his intellectual talents obtained a fitting field of exercise. His work in this sphere was done as Professor of Fine Art at Liverpool University, subse- quently as art critic of the ' Pall Mall Gazette,' and in numerous contributions to magazines. He left his mark as a critic chiefly in his * Art of Velasquez,' a treatise not only on the Spanish painter, but on the principles of pure pictorial art. The two cousins were much together in their early years. ' Bob ' is Stevenson's companion in Child's Play, and was 242 A BOOK OF R. L. S. his fellow conspirator in those light-hearted practical jokes on the good people of Edinburgh, related in the Autobiography (q.v.). His studentship in Paris in the atelier of Carolus Duran was the occasion of the visits of R. L. S. to the artists' colonies of Fon- tainebleau, which have had their chronicler in Mr. Will H. Low {q.v.). The Stennis brothers of The Wrecker — the name was the nearest approach to * Stevenson ' which the Barbizon innkeeper could make — re- present their habit of random travel at this time. But the most characteristic quality of R. A. M. Stevenson was his brilliance in talk. Somebody has . said he was the best talker of his generation. He is Spring-Heel' d Jack in Talk and Talkers and was, in his cousin's words, ' the most valuable man to talk to, above all in his younger days ; for he twisted like a serpent, changed like the patterns of a kaleidoscope, transmigrated (it is the only word) from one point of view to another with a swiftness and completeness that left a stupid and merely logical mind panting in the rear.' Two of Steven- son's characters are drawn, in part, from his cousin. Otto in Prince Otto owes something of his indecision to the irresolution in practical affairs which was a trait of R. A. M. S., while Somerset in More New Arabian Nights reflects his ' indefatigable feverish mind.' STEVENSON, THOMAS (1818-1887) Stevenson's father was the youngest son of Robert Stevenson {q.v.), in whose firm he became a partner in 1846. From 1853 to within two years of his death A BOOK OF R. L. S. 243 in 1887 he was engineer to the Commissioners of Northern Lights. While hghthouse building and harbour construction were a part of his profession, the optical control of lighthouse illuminants was his special study, to which he made several notable con- tributions. His books on lighthouse construction and illumination are still standard works on this subject. It is natural enough that he should have wished his only son to have adopted the family pro- fession, but remarkable that, when that was found impossible, he should have been so averse from a literary career. For the elder Stevenson had strongly developed in him both the romantic spirit, and the sense of picturesque expression which char- acterized R. L. S. He was accustomed to put him- self to sleep with tales made to himself of robbers, roadside inns, ships, and sailors. A sentence of his quoted by R. L. S. is an example of both this de- scriptive speech and his morbid religious mind ; it is his view of life ' as a shambling sort of omnibus which is taking him to his hotel.' The differences between father and son — and they lasted only a year or two — arose partly from the conflict of their views on religious matters, and partly from the son's contempt of the social conventions of his father's circle. Putting these disputes aside, their relationship was of the most affectionate character. R. L. S. once committed to the business of writing, the father's allowances to him were on the scale of his needs, the wife and stepson were made quite of the household, and as time went on an almost pathetic solicitude was displayed for his son's health. 244 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Ofother traits we have a sketch in Stevenson's paper on his father, pubhshed in the ' Contemporary Review/ June 1887, though it deals for the most part with his professional life. The only other portrait of his father is that of him as a boy contained in a fragment written for A Family of Engineers, but published in Sir Graham Balfour's ' Life/ In it R. L. S. dwells on the habits of truantry and practical jokes in which the boyhood of the father anticipated that of the son. Thomas Stevenson lived just long enough to see his son famous, and in the last year of his life went out of his way to confess to an old friend (Sir James Dewar) his error of judgment of twenty years before in seeking to make Louis an engineer. STIMULATION OF THE ALPS, THE This delicate analysis of the sensations of the visitor in search of health in the high valleys of the Alps belongs to the first winter which Stevenson {cBt. 30) spent at Davos. And the best that he can say of Hfe amid the Alpine mountains is : ' But one thing is undeniable — that in the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive. It does not, perhaps, come out of him in work or exercise, yet he feels an enthusiasm of the blood unknown in more temperate climates. It may not be health, but it is fun.' The essay which is more cheerful in tone than the others, Davos in Winter, Health and A BOOK OF R. L. S. 245 Mountains, and Alpine Diversions, describing these chapters in Stevenson's Hfe, appeared in the * Pall Mall Gazette,' March 5, 1881, and is placed in Essays of Travel. STODDARD, CHARLES WARREN (1843-1909) Stevenson came to know the author of ' Summer Cruises in the South Seas/ and other books of Pacific travels, as Sir Sidney Colvin explains, during his first visit to San Francisco in 1880. Their in- formal meeting is introduced into the chapter ' Faces on the City Front ' of The Wrecker, which contains a little picture of the place where Stoddard had his ' strange den upon a hill in . . . one of the most San Francisco-y parts of San Francisco/ Stoddard, it will be seen, introduced him to Her- mann Melville's ' Omoo,' and by the recital of his own experiences added to the fascination which from his youth the South Sea Islands had for him. STORY OF A LIE, THE This story may be said to mark the transition of Stevenson's writing from essays of character and landscape to works of incident or adventure. It is his first story with pretence to a constructive plot ; a minor achievement in this field where The Pavilion on the Links, written six months afterwards, is one of his greatest successes. The Story of a Lie was written on the steerage passage to New York in August 1879 {cBt. 29) * in great anxiety of mind ' for the outcome of the journey to find his future wife which he had precipitately undertaken. The chief character of 246 A BOOK OF R. L. S. the tale, the broken-down rascal of an artist, is evidently taken from Stevenson's occasional Paris experiences of the previous three years. He was in fact a sketch from life, for Stevenson afterw^ards wrote that ' the Admiral was recognized in America,' though there is no hint of his identity in the gossip of Mr. W. H. Low on R. L. S.'s acquaintances in French artists' circles. He is, however, just the type of picturesque scamp that appealed to Stevenson and could make him write, apropos of illustrations for the tale, ' though " The Lie " is not much in the way of pictures, I should hke to see my dear Admiral in the flesh. I love this Admiral ; I give my head that man 's alive.' The story appeared in the * New Quarterly Maga- zine,' October 1879, and is now placed in Tales and Fantasies. STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE The book which put Stevenson's name in the mouth of the * man in the street,' hfted him at a single bound to a place among men of the time and, by the still greater sensation which it created in America, led to the large income which soon after- wards he drew from the United States. The ear of a great public to whom his earlier writings were unknown was captured by this intense picture of the elements of good and evil in man's nature. It was hailed from pulpits and in the religious press as a great moral^parable; though its moral quality, on cTose analysis, is seen to be more an illusion, due to A BOOK OF R. L. S. 247 the art of its writing, than the essence of the fable. Reduced to its simplest formula Jekyll and Hyde is a cry of terror at the potency for evil latent in the human soul. ( Such moral force as it has depends upon its assault on the nerves, not on its appeal to the heart. If not thus interpreted by the preachers of the time, it yet served the purpose of moving their hearers by the spectacle of the evil partner in the human ego, indulged in a moment ' when virtue slumbered,' coming in the end to destroy the good. Yet it can be seen from the facts of the genesis of the story in his biography that the moral dress of Jekyll and Hyde was an afterthought which Steven- son owed to his wife's criticism of the first draft of the tale. But for that it would plainly have been a study in psychological horror more akin to his two earlier works of this kind, Markheim and Thrawn Janet, both no doubt of a higher order of art than Jekyll and Hyde, but the latter without profession of any moral quality. For a long time the idea of the dual nature of our being had been in Stevenson's mind as the ground- work of a tale. One with this as its subject, and entitled ' The Travelling Companion,' had been written at Hyeres and had been rejected by one editor as * a work of genius, but indecent.' We know nothing more of it than that Stevenson at Bournemouth in the summer of 1885 (cet. 35) con- demned it as * a foul, gross, bitter, ugly daub ... a carrion tale,' and turned to discover a fresh medium for the same idea. A dream brought him what he wanted in the shape of the transforming powders and, 248 A BOOK OF R. L. S. as he afterwards declared in A Chapter on Dreams, the central idea of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. These, and the incident at the window were the material from which in a torrent of in- spiration the first draft of the story was written within three days. In accordance with the arrange- ments between them at this time, the draft then received his wife's written criticism — written because his physical condition forbade all discussion. Mrs. Stevenson's objection was to the work being made a story instead of a piece of allegory. As first conceived, Jekyll's was a wholly evil nature, and the transformation into Hyde resorted to as a dis- guise. Acting at once on this suggestion, Stevenson burnt his first manuscript, and again in three days sought to reproduce his dream as a sinister moral fable instead of a merely ghastly tale. But it may be said that he only put a veneer of parable upon his first conception. On the stage, however, in this case art rather than morals has its way, and the dramatized version of the fable has achieved a measure of success which Stevenson's own attempts with Henley at play- writing never came near to attaining. The first, and unquestionably the greatest impersonation of the Jekyll-Hyde creation was that of the gifted Anglo-American actor Richard Mansfield, for whom, with Stevenson's consent, the story was adapted for the stage by Thomas Russel Sullivan, and first pro- duced at Boston Museum, May 9, 1887. It was presented at the Madison Square theatre, New York, on September 10, in the same year within a few days A BOOK OF R. L. S. 249 of Stevenson's arrival in the United States. He himself was too ill to witness Mansfield's horrific portrayal of Jekyll as a terror-haunted man, or to share in the sensation of the New York audiences at the transformation from Jekyll to Hyde, which the actor produced simply by the muscles of his face and posture of his body. So startling was the change that Mansfield felt called upon to declare that he employed no secret make-up nor any stage device except lighting. The success of the piece was such that, in the absence of copyright in the book, numerous stage versions of it were produced, most of them of the crudest description. The best of these, though artistically greatly inferior to Mansfield's, was that of a German-American actor, Daniel Bandmann, who brought his play to London in the following year, and endeavoured to steal a march on Mansfield, who also had arranged to play it in England. The two versions came before London playgoers almost simultaneously, Mansfield's at the Lyceum on August 4, and Bandmann's at the Opera Comique on August 6, 1888. The latter was played only twice : its comic scenes in the manner of trans- pontine melodrama made it a travesty of the essential idea. Mansfield's was given a place in his repertoire until September, and was regularly played by him in America until his retirement in 1907. He has left it on record that he suffered martyrdom in acting the part, more, it would seem, from anxiety that the stage arrangements would not support his facial changes than from emotional strain. The English performing rights in Mansfield's play were subse- 250 A BOOK OF R. L. S. quently acquired by Sir Henry Irving, whose son, Mr. H. B. Irving, revived it with himself in the double part at the Lyric Theatre, London, in 1910. Apart from the regular dramatizations, the book has provided the groundwork of two other plays, ' The Doctor's Shadow,' by H. A. Saintsbury in 1896, and ' The Phantom,' by H. C. Edwards in 1888. And a very dull parody of it is among the Stevenson literature in the British Museum, viz., ' The Stranger Case of Dr. Hide and Mr. Crushall.' By Robert L. Bathos,' a sixpenny pamphlet of 1886, from an Adelphi publisher named Bevington. Translations of Jekyll and Hyde are numerous. That into French, pubhshed in 1890, is by Mrs. W. H. Low\ The first edition of the book, issued by Messrs. Longmans early in 1886 at is. in paper covers, and IS. 6d. in cloth, has fluctuated in value at the present time from £1 to £3. STRONG, MRS. ISOBEL STUART (about 1865- ) The stepdaughter who during Stevenson's last years in Samoa acted as his amanuensis, was married, within a few weeks of R. L. S.'s own marriage to her mother, to Joseph Dwight Strong. Their son, Austin Strong, is the author of plays, e.g., * The Drums of Clude,' and 'The Toymaker of Nuremberg,' produced in London and New^ York. For some years after her marriage Mrs. Strong was a resident in Honolulu, and it was through her husband's friends that Stevenson on his arrival there in the A BOOK OF R. L. S. 251 ' Casco ' became friends with the native king Kala- kaua. On the house at Vaihma being completed Mrs. Strong and her son made their home there. Her part in the household may be judged from a letter of Stevenson's to Sir James Barrie, describing the amanuensis : ' Runs me hke a baby in a peram- bulator, sees I 'm properly dressed, bought me silk socks, and made me wear them, takes care of me when I 'm well, from writing my books to trimming my nails. Has a growing conviction that she is the author of my works, manages the house and the houseboys, who are very fond of her. Does all the hair-cutting of the family. Will cut yours, and doubtless object to the way you part it. Mine has been re-organized twice.' The book ' Memories of Vailima' (London, Constable, 1903) contains her very intimate picture of Stevenson's Hfe in Samoa, and particularly of the ways and moods in which he took up the writing of St. Ives and Weir of Hermiston. Of the latter Mrs. Strong writes : ' Louis and I have been writing, work- ing away every morning like steam-engines on Hermiston. Louis got a set-back with Anne, and he has put it aside for a while. He worried terribly over it, but could not make it run smoothly. He read it aloud one evening and Lloyd criticized the love-scene, so Louis threw the whole thing over for a time. Fortunately he picked up Hermiston all right, and is in better spirits at once. He has always been wonderfully clear and sustained in his dictation, but he gener- ally made notes in the early morning, which he 252 A BOOK OF R. L. S. elaborated as he read them aloud. In Hermiston he had hardly more than a line or two of notes to keep him on the track, but he never falters for a word, giving me the sentences, with capital letters and all the stops, as clearly and steadily as though he were reading from an unseen book. He walks up and down the room as I write, and his voice is so beautiful and the story so interesting that I forget to rest.* Mrs. Strong is also the author of the volume on Stevenson in Messrs. Cassell's ' Little Books on Great Writers ' (191 1), a very rapid sketch, with one or two personal reminiscences. STUBBS, LAURA Author of ' Stevenson's Shrine ' (London, De La Moore Press, 1903), the story of a visit to Vailima, and to Stevenson's tomb made eight years after his death. The book is illustrated with some good photographs of the house and household taken during Stevenson's lifetime. STYLE IN LITERATURE, ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF A most technical paper on the elementary quaUties such as pattern, rhythm, and phrasing, which dis- tinguish prose literature, was the work of five days in bed at Bournemouth in the winter of 1884 (c^t. 34). It and other earlier papers, viz., those on Realism and on Romance, were considered the beginning A BOOK OF R. L. S. 253 for a work on literature — ' a small arid book that shall one day appear.' Stevenson became seriously enthusiastic in this study of the technical art of the writer ; spoke of it as ' path-breaking and epoch- making,' and a year or so afterwards began the pre- paration of a course of lectures, for delivery in London, in which his theories of style might have been addressed to students. The paper appeared in the ' Contemporary Review,' April 1885, and is placed in The Art of Writing. SWANSTON The ' hamlet of some twenty cottages in a woody fold of a green hill ' w as the country home where the happiest of Stevenson's Edinburgh days were spent. The hill is Caerketton, the most eastern, and in some respects the noblest of the Pentland heights. It dominates the landscape between Swanston near its foot and the city of Edinburgh four miles away. Thomas Stevenson took what is now famous as Swanston Cottage w^hen his son was seventeen, and in summer and winter alike R. L. S. was constantly there, busy within doors, or making long rambles on the hills. The cottage has been much enlarged since Stevenson made it the place of refuge of Champdivers in St. Ives, but the hamlet in its secluded position adjoining the Lothianbum Golf Course on the Car- lops road, has changed very little since his time. The present tenant of the house is Stevenson's old friend of his advocate days, Lord Guthrie, who has collected there many portraits, manuscripts, and other memorials of R. L. S. 254 A BOOK OF R. L. S. SWINNERTON, FRANK (1884- ) The most recent and by far the most searching analysis, in the technical sense, of Stevenson's writ- ings is marked by a curious undercurrent of dis- approval, even dislike. It is impossible to deny the literary skill of Mr. Swinnerton's ' Robert Louis Stevenson : A Critical Study ' (London, Martin Seeker, 1914), and difficult to disagree with much of its criticism. The fact which crops up unpleas- antly in nearly every page is the author's antagonism to the personality of R. L. S. It is the kind of study which it can be imagined Dr. Clifford might write of Ignatius Loyola. The charm of Stevenson is seemingly something outside the understanding of Mr. Swinnerton, who is hard put to it to explain its fascination for the reader, and must find explanations in the idolization of R. L. S. by the shallow-brained. SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON (1840-1893) In Symonds, the writer on art and literature, and particularly on the Renaissance in Italy, Stevenson found a certain solace when they first met, invalids both, in Davos in 1880. Symonds had made his home there, and as successive recurrences of illness sent R. L. S. back to the Alps, the two men, despite differences in temperament, were glad of each other's society. A more heartening companion could have been wished for Stevenson. In Symonds a pre- dominant trait was an intense and restless spirit of religious inquiry which put aside all dogmas but brought its possessor, divided between desire for belief in a personal God and intellectual inability to A BOOK OF R. L. S. 255 accept the conception, no more than a resigned melancholy. To him R. L. S. with his gay courage was * Sprite ' and * Quick shining Firefly/ Symonds's cheerless self-criticism of his own diffused powers was the antithesis of Stevenson's hopeful expecta- tions of mastering his art. Little wonder that R. L. S. should have set him down as ' much of an invahd in mind and character/ and that the companionship, as he wrote to his friend Gosse, was for him ' to adventure in a thornbush.' Talk and Talkers, where Opalstein is Symonds, lends colour to this early impression, but as time went on his regard deepened for Symonds's char- acter and struggle with persistent ill-health. In the latter feeling he sought publicly to join with him by way of a dedication of the book of travels in the South Seas, which he sent to Symonds for his consent to its appearance. One passage ran : * Our fathers, it would seem, wondered and doubted how they had merited their misfortunes : we rather how we have deserved our happiness.' Symonds's answer apparently miscarried. His death in 1893 moved R. L. S. to regret that he had not renewed his request to the ' strange, poignant, pathetic, brilliant creature.' TALES AND FANTASIES The volume of three stories, The Misadventures of John Nicholson, The Body Snatcher, and The Story of a Lie, all juvenile work of Stevenson's. The book is issued by Messrs. Chatto & Windus. 256 A BOOK OF R. L. S. TALK AND TALKERS Written at Davos towards the end of 1881 (<^/. 31), and published in the ' Cornhill Magazine,' April and August 1882. In the collected works it is appro- priately placed in Memories and Portraits, for in the first paper R. L. S. * full-lengthened the conversation ' of half a dozen of his friends, most of them of his early Edinburgh days. Spring-heel'd Jack is his cousin, R. A. M. Stevenson ; Burly is W. E. Henley ; Cockshot, Professor Fleeming Jenkin ; Athelred, Sir Walter Simpson of the Inland Voyage; Opal- stein, John Addington Symonds ; and Purcel, Mr. Edmund Gosse. The reference at the end of the last paragraph but one in the first paper is to his friend, Charles Baxter. With the exception of Professor Jenkin, who was fifteen years his senior, these friends were about Stevenson's own age. It is the talk of youth in the twenties. Henley, to take one instance, had not, in later life, the ' boisterous and piratic ' manner and intolerance in talk for which R. L. S. declared his admiration. THERMAL INFLUENCE OF FORESTS, ON THE This second technical paper of Stevenson's was read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, May 19, 1873 [(St. 23) . It is a study of the then current know- ledge of the effects of woods and forest on rainfall and climate generally. It was not intended to have any literary merit, and is republished only in the complete editions of the collected works. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 257 THOREAU, HENRY DAVID It must always be an occasion for some wonder that the author of * Walden ' attracted Stevenson as he did. There are so many and such vital differ- ences in the instincts of the two men. One contrasts Thoreau's vegetable Hfe with Stevenson's animal spirits ; his indifference to his neighbours with Stevenson's yearning for friends ; his dehberate abstinence from common pleasures with Stevenson's gospel of happiness ; in short, the negative aloof- ness of Thoreau with the positive eagerness of R. L. S. On the other hand, it is easy to see a strong affinity in the refusal of each of them to sacrifice his cherished purposes in hfe to the business of earning a hvehhood. Stevenson quoted Thoreau : ' The cost of a thing is the amount of what I would call life which is required to be exchanged for it immedi- ately or in the long run,' and approvingly adds his own version ' that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.' It was this love of freedom, of escape from uncongenial toil in order to exercise his natural powers, that clearly commended Thoreau to R. L. S., just as the self-centred form it took com- pelled the harsh phrases of the essay. These, it will be remembered, aroused the protest of a student and biographer of Thoreau, Dr. A. H. Japp, whose letters and visit to Stevenson prompted the reply that ' I would give up most other things to be as good a man as Thoreau.' But it can easily be imagined that Stevenson, when writing his essay at Monterey {cet. 29), in the months before his marriage to Mrs. Osboume, should have been impatient of 258 A BOOK OF R. L. S. the abstinence of all neighbourly thoughts which obtrudes itself with such an emphasis in Thoreau's works. Here, as he confessed after the appearance of the piece in the ' Cornhill Magazine ' (June 1880), and its inclusion in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, he had drawn a distorted portrait of the man from his writings. And there is added the some- what unexpected admission : * Upon me this pure, narrow, sunnily ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten sentences since I w^as introduced to him, bujt his influence might somewhere be detected by a close observer.' THRAWN JANET This short story of the supernatural belongs to the series of tales of psychological terror which Stevenson and his wife planned during the first year of their marriage. It was written at Pitlochry in the Highlands in 1881 [est. 31), at the same time as The Merry Men, with which its style has much in common. The introduction of a black man as a terrifying impersonation is used in both tales. The old Scottish superstition that the Devil appears as a black evidently ran in Stevenson's mind at this time. In his thirtieth year he found the same fearful pleasure in the legends of bogies and witchcraft as when his nurse told him these tales of her country. This susceptibihty to the horrific — he declared that the writing of Thrawn Janet ' nearly frightens me to death ' — is plainly the inspiration of the tale, and has its recognition in the foremost place among his short stories to which critics, with remarkable un- A BOOK OF R. L. S. 259 animity, have assigned it. It was Stevenson's first prose work to be written wholly in Scots, and save for ' Tod Lapraik/ introduced into Catriona, his last. Stevenson, once again anticipating his critics, coupled the two tales as work which together of themselves would be enough to entitle him to be a writer. Thrawn Janet appeared in the ' Comhill Magazine,' October 1881, and is included in The Merry Men. THREE PLAYS Deacon Brodie, Beau Austin, and Admiral Guinea, by Henley and Stevenson, were issued under this title by Mr. David Nutt in 1892. The present value is about I OS. See ' Plays.' TICONDEROGA See ' Ballads.' TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CEVENNES While the fame of Stevenson is associated in the public mind with Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde, it may be thought that the Travels with a Donkey will live the longest in the estimation of a more eclectic class on account of its unique expression of Stevenson's unconscious art of making himself interesting to the reader. A certain critic, who cannot understand Stevenson, is offended by the egoism which causes the reader to share the sensa- tions of the owner of Modestine more acutely than those of, say, Robinson Crusoe. The habit passed in some measure as Stevenson grew older, but the 26o A BOOK OF R. L. S. book preserves a certain picture which, though it does not suggest the high spirits of his youth, can be taken as one of himself in these early days. Indeed the circumstances of the journey were not those to inspire high spirits. Mrs. Osboume after having spent two years in France had that summer returned to America, and Stevenson, who had been in Paris for the first six months of the year (1878), must have set out to Monastier, in August, with very dark thoughts of the uncertainty in which the desire of his life was involved. Thus when the book was published in the following year he wrote to R. A. M. Stevenson, ' Lots of it is mere protestation to F. (Mrs. Osbourne), most of which I think you will understand. That is to me the main thread of interest. Whether the damned pubhc — but that 's all one.' The public may be thought not to have detected the note of the anxious lover in such pas- sages as that on the monks of our Lady of the Snows : * And I blessed God that I was free to wander, free to hope, and free to love.' It is scarcely accurate, as Stevenson remarks in one place, to speak of the journey as in the Cevennes. During the greater number of his twelve days he was west of the range which for three hundred miles runs from not far south of Lyons to within thirt3^ miles of the Mediterranean, and forms the watershed of the Loire and Allier in the west and, in the east, of the roaring tributaries of the Rhone. His way lay chiefly in the forbidding but less formidable hills of the Velay, in Upper Gevaudan, and in the Lozere mountains. The Pic de Finiels in the latter range, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 261 which Stevenson calls ' The Cevennes of the Cevennes/ is classed by many geographers as a height of a dis- tinct mountain group, though actually an eastern spur midway in the Cevennes range. Indeed Steven- son was most truly in the Cevennes on the last day of his journey when crossing their southern slope from St. Germain de Calberte to St. Jean de Gard. The point is referred to only by way of warning to those studying the places of the journey that they will find few of them mentioned in the guide-books and other works on the Cevennes, but need to consult chiefly those on the topography of Haute-Loire, of which an admirable modem example is that by M. Marcelin Boule (Paris, Masson et Cie, 191 1). The country through w^hich he journeyed was, and still is, the most deficient in ordinary comforts for the traveller of any in France. Between Monastier, from which he started, after a month's stay spent in completing the New Arabian Nights and the Pictur- csque Notes on Edinburgh, to St. Jean de Gard, there is scarcely a place which boasts an inn offering more than the most primitive accommodation. But though Stevenson did not seek the more sceni- cally attractive parts of the country, which are to be found chiefly in the Department of Ardeche, in few parts of Western Europe could he have travelled by so many river courses, or experienced the abrupt change from highlands of Siberian winters to a country of the South within sight almost of the vine and ohve-yards of Herault. Crossing the beginning of the Loire and the AlHer at Langogne, Cheylard and Luc in the bleak, bare valleys of Upper Gevaudan 262 A BOOK OF R. L. S. were places on the way to La Bastide whence the road was taken to the Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of the Snows, entirely destroyed by fire in the early summer of 1912. Thence from Bleymard over considerable ridges of the Lozere to Pont de Montvert on the Tarn, thence westward along the Tarn Valley to Florae, the only place of any size in the itinerary, and from Florae by the valley of the Mimente through the heart of the Camisard country to St. Jean de Gard, where Modestine was sold and the stage coach taken to the railway at Alais. The route of this journey has been followed twenty years afterwards by a lover of Stevenson, Mr. J. A. Hammerton, who tried but, as is not surprising, failed to discover a single person who remembered the traveller with a donkey. The story of this pil- grimage is told in the book ' In the Track of Steven- son,' the photographs in which of some of the forlorn hamlets which were Stevenson's objectives exemplify his doctrine of travelling ' not to go anywhere but to go.' At any rate Mr. Hammerton was able to learn the identity of the waitress Clarisse of Pont de Mont- vert, whose features had moved Stevenson to regret that she should be ' left to country admirers and a country way of thought.' A married life in the dis- trict, as Mr. Hammerton ascertained, was, however, her lot, savoured perhaps in odd moments of recol- lection by the knowledge conveyed to her that she had figured in a work of literature. But her phleg- matic countenance, which Mr. Hammerton repro- duces in his volume, discourages the thought that Clarisse derived any satisfaction from having been A BOOK OF R. L. S. 263 the original of a not altogether flattering portrait. It was at Pont de Montvert that Stevenson entered the country memorable for the struggles of the Camisards for rehgious Uberty in the early years of the eighteenth century. The Protestant Cevenols who in these trackless hills defended their faith against the soldiers of Louis xiv. could not fail to be coupled in his mind with the Scottish Covenanters. For the rest of the journey the religious war crops up again and again in his pages, and at Cassagnas, as he says, his historical acquirements gained him some respect. The persecution might well have formed the groundwork of an historical romance in later years, but there is no evidence of Stevenson having ever entertained the idea. The late S. R. Crockett, however, took it as the basis of his novel ' Flower o' the Corn.' The book was written in Edinburgh in the winter of 1878 {cet. 28), and on pubhcation in June 1879 attracted scarcely more notice in literary circles than An Inland Voyage of the previous year. The copy- right in the two and in that of Virginihus Puerisque was bought back from the publishers for as little as one hundred pounds. The first edition issued by Kegan Paul, and containing the frontispiece by Walter Crane in the style of illustrations of ' The Pilgrim's Progress,' is rare, and recently reahzed sums from £10 to £18. TREASURE ISLAND The book which made Stevenson famous, and has since become a classic among tales of adventure, to 264 A BOOK OF R. L. S. be ranked with ' Robinson Crusoe.' Its appearance did much more than estabhsh him as a writer for boy readers. In fact, the book was not instantaneously a success among readers of that day, pledged to Captain Marry at and his imitators. But it brought Stevenson prominently to the notice of an elder public, able to perceive the uncommon power of romantic description which marked Treasure Island from previous tales of adventure. Mayne Reid and Ballantyne have their sway over the youthful mind, but it is scarcely conceivable that Mr. Gladstone would have searched London for a book by either, as he is said to have done for a copy of Treasure Island, on the first edition being sold out at the publishers. A couple of years passed before this yarn of buc- caneers and mutiny on the high seas became one of the most popular of boys' books. Meanwhile its author, who had never been a campaigner hke Mayne Reid in Mexico, or Ballantyne with the Hudson Bay Company, but had lived in a bedroom world of romance of his own making, first found himself recognized as a writer of note outside the small literary circle in which his work was esteemed. The circumstances of its writing and publication are in some respects unlike those of his other books. Returning to England after his marriage in San Francisco in the summer of 1880, R. L. S., with his wife and stepson, spent the winter at Davos, came to Edinburgh in the spring and, with his parents and family, spent part of the summer at Braemar in the Highlands. It was a miserably wet season, he was reduced to prostration by a cold, and partly A BOOK OF R. L. S. 265 for the amusement of his stepson, he began the tale which he called The Sea-Cook or Treasure Island. To Henley he wrote : * If this don't fetch the kids, why, they have gone rotten since my day. Will you be surprised to learn that it is about Buccaneers, that it begins in the "Admiral Benbow " pubhc-house on Devon coast, that it is all about a map, and a treasure, and a mutiny, and a derehct ship, and a current, and a fine old Squire Trelawney (the real Tre, purged of Hterature and sin, to suit the infant mind), and a doctor, and another doctor, and a sea- cook with one leg, and a sea-song with the chorus " Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum " (at the third Ho, you heave at the capstan bars), which is a real buc- caneer's song only known to the crew of the late Captain Flint (died of rum at Key West, much re- gretted, friends please accept this intimation) ; and lastly, will you be surprised to hear in this connection the name of Routledge ? That 's the kind of man I am, blast your eyes. Two chapters are written, and have been tried on Lloyd with great success ; the trouble is to work it off without oaths. Buc- caneers wdthout oaths — bricks without straw. But youth and the fond parent have to be consulted.' Mr. Edmund Gosse, who was among the visitors who came to Braemar, has preserved for us in ' Critical Kit-Kats ' a sketch of what Stevenson's days were like while Treasure Island was in progress : ' After breakfast I went to Louis' bedroom where he sat up in bed with dark flashing eyes and ruffled hair, and we played chess on the coverlet. Not a word passed, for he was strictly forbidden to speak in the 266 A BOOK OF R. L. S. early part of the day. As soon as he felt tired — often in the middle of a game — he would rap with peremp- tory knuckles on the board as a signal to stop, and then Mrs. Stevenson or I would arrange his writing materials on the bed. Then I would see no more of him till dinner-time, when he would appear smihng and voluble, the horrid bar of speechlessness having been let down. Then every night, after dinner, he would read to us what he had written during the day. I find a note to my wife dated September 3, 1881 : " Louis has been writing all the time I have been here a novel of pirates and hidden treasure, in the highest degree exciting. He reads it to us every night, chapter by chapter." ' The elder Stevenson in whom, for all his rigid beliefs, w^as a strong strain of romance, took the livehest interest in the tale and, as his son declared in the essay My First Book, compiled the list of things found in Billy Bones's chest. In this friendly atmo- sphere the book shaped itself at the rate of something like a chapter a day until more than half of it was done. It flowed from Stevenson as scarcely any other of his longer works did — ' No writing,' he wrote to Henley, ' just drive along as the words come and the pen will scratch.' And while it was in the making there came another visitor. Dr. Alexander Japp, by whom it was introduced to a publisher. The publisher was a friend of Dr. Japp's, Mr. James Henderson, for whose paper, ' Young Folks,' it was accepted at the miserable price of £2, los. a page (of 4500 words), not more than is paid to the hack reporter of police-court cases. However Stevenson A BOOK OF R. L. S. 267 retained his copyright in the work, and Treasure Island (the choice of title was Mr. Henderson's) began an obscure and undistinguished appearance in ' Young Folks/ where it ran from October i, 1881, to January 28, 1882. Before more than a chapter or two had been published the severe weather had driven Stevenson again to Davos where, after an anxious interval in which ' there was not one word of Treasure Island in my bosom,' the tale was finished with the same ease and zest which marked its beginning. In * Young Folks * Stevenson used the pseudonym ' Captain George North,' no doubt for the reason that he did not wish to injure what reputation he had gained as a contributor of essays and stories of a different character to ' Temple Bar ' and the ' Corn- hill.' If that were so he was mistaken, for the publication of Treasure Island in book form, by the notice it brought him, was the means of interesting the public in his other work, though equally it created the idea, even now not quite extinct, that he is * just a writer of stories for boys.' At any rate in the spring of 1882, the text was revised and the book offered, apparently without success, to pub- lishers of his more serious writings. It was not until a year later, after a spell of nearly nine months in which he was too ill to work, that he wrote jubilantly to his parents : ' My dearest People,— I have had a great piece of news. There has been offered for Treasure Island — how much do you suppose ? I believe it would be an excellent jest to keep the answer till my next letter. For two cents I would 268 A BOOK OF R. L. S. do so. Shall I ? Anyway, I '11 turn the page first. No — well — a hundred pounds, all alive ! a hundred jingling, tingling golden-minted quid ! Is not this wonderful. ... It does look as if I should support myself without trouble in the future. If I have only health, I can, thank God. It is dreadful to be a great big man, and not be able to buy bread.' Messrs. Cassell published Treasure Island in De- cember 1883 at the same time that The Silverado Squatters appeared with Messrs. Chatto & Windus, and from that time Stevenson had gained the ear of the reading public. The sales of the former may be judged from the fact that up to 1919 £6000 had been paid in royalties. In his ' Idler ' article of 1894 Stevenson declared that the germ of the story was the map drawn for the wall of his stepson's playroom at Braemar, and afterwards lost when the book was undertaken. The second one (issued with the volume), made wdth much labour to fit the incidents of the tale, and then re-drawn in his father's ofhce, was sold at Sotheby's in 1914 for ;^44. An equal inspiration of the story was a mere name, ' The Dead Man's Chest,' which Stevenson lighted on in Charles Kingsley's * At Last,' a volume of travel in the West Indies. It was that of one of the many Virgin Islands which English buccaneers had re-titled in accordance with their profession of plunder. With these as the germ and seed, Stevenson's reading of Defoe, W^ashington Irving, and Poe (evidently * The Gold Bug '), and Captain Charles Johnson's * Lives of Pirates and Highwaymen/ supplemented by his own experience A BOOK OF R. L. S. 269 on sailing-ships, formed the material of Treasure Island, whilst his friend Henley, by a process of transmutation, provided the genesis of the central figure of the one-legged cook, Silver (q.v.). Treasure Island on its appearance was reproduced and pirated in all directions. It has been produced as a film story for the cinematograph, and is beyond doubt the most largely sold of any of Stevenson's works. The first edition of 292 pages with map frontispiece, now rather rare, is worth about £7. TREASURE OF FRANCHARD, THE The story which more than any other betrays Stevenson's intimate understanding of French Hfe and spirit ; also almost the only one in which he felt pleased with his drawing of a woman. Anastasie, the placid, affectionate wife of the egoistic Dr. Desprez, was a portrait of a Madame La Chevre, wife of a painter, at whose house in Barbizon R. L. S. and his cousin Bob were frequent guests. Moreover, the touch of marital irregularity which in the story is no more than a possibility to be averted, had its counterpart in the original of Anastasie. Mr. W. H. Low, who also was a friend of theirs, relates in ' A Chronicle of Friendships ' that she and M. La Chevre had not the consent of the latter's mother to their marriage. Under French law the son or daughter may serve a legal notice upon the parents of the in- tention to marry, and after three repetitions of this ceremony, the marriage may take place. Yet the closeness of the family tie in France is such that this legal right is seldom exercised. Thus it was that 270 A BOOK OF R. L. S. the La Chevres, the most staid of couples, were not legally joined in matrimony until after the death of the husband's mother when both were well beyond middle life. Mr. Low recalls Stevenson's shout of elation years afterwards on learning of his (Low's) instant recognition of Madame La Chevre in The Treasure of Franchard. The greater part of the story was written at Kingussie in the Highlands in the autumn of 1882 [cet. 32). It was finished at St. Marcel, near Mar- seilles, in November of the same year during a period of fever and exhaustion, from which he did not begin to recover until the following spring. It appeared in ' Longman's Magazine ' for April and May 1883, but not until it had been rejected for a reason which R. L. S. recalled ten years afterwards : * This is a poison - bad world for the romancer, this Anglo- Saxon world ; I usually get out of it by not having any women at all ; but when I remember I had the Treasure of Franchard refused as unfit for a family magazine I feel despair upon my wrists.' In the collected works the story is placed in The Merry Men. UNDERWOODS Stevenson's first volume of verse — if we except the Child's Garden. It consists of fifty-four pieces, sixteen of which are in Scots. Many were here pub- lished for the first time ; others had appeared in the * Magazine of Art,' ' Comhill,' and other periodicals. The volume, which was issued in 1887 {cd. 37), at the time of Stevenson's final departure from Europe, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 271 was dedicated to physicians who had attended him, a plural salutation on which Mr. Edmund Gosse pleasantly rallied him in a review of the poems. Here he touched his friend on a highly vulnerable spot. Stevenson's pride in these famihar addresses from the housetops is patent, and he retorted that * to miscarry in a dedication is an abominable form of book-wreck.' The verses of Underwoods, like those of Songs of Travel, are as eloquent expression of the man as the Child's Garden is of his earliest years. * Not a dozen ordinary interview^ers,' wrote Mr. Edmund Gosse, * could have extracted so much of the character of the man himself ' as they contain. They are now included in the Collected Poems. VILLON, FRANQOIS The essay which bears this title does more than present the life of Villon ; it is an illuminating glance on a piece of Paris society in the fifteenth century. Stevenson, then twenty-five, went for his facts chiefly to the ' £tude Biographique sur Francois Villon ' of Auguste Longnon, issued in 1877, and publishing for the first time the authentic docu- ments of the poet's life. But he drew also from the older works on Villon, from the * Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris,' and the ' Chronique scan- daleuse ' ; and from these sources composed a picture of Villon's life such as can be found nowhere else in the literature of the poet. Marcel Schwob, a great authority on Villon, pointed out some years ago in a letter to Sir Sidney Colvin that, while Stevenson passed on one or two of the errors of the writers on 272 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Villon, in other instances his intuition led him to anticipate correctly the results of later research, as, for example, in recognizing La Grosse Margot (Fat Peg) of the grimy ballad as a real person. As a contribution to the study of Villon the essay has been rather adversely criticized. It is nine-tenths of it a picture of Villon's rascalities. R. L. S. dis- misses Villon's art almost cavalierly, without appear- ing to have thought it worth while to offer a study of the causes of its survival through four hundred years. The ribald character of the poet plainly shocks his Scotch moral sense. He pursues him with epithets of disgust, never seems moved to view Villon's loose living and thievish tricks through the spectacles of the fifteenth century, and must even heighten his misdoings so that he stands out as the unpleasantest rogue in Paris in 1460. The romantic in Stevenson must have sprung to the muddy melo- drama of Villon, but as great a lover of the romantic, Mr. de Vere Stacpoole, has regretted what he detects as a sneering and self-righteous attitude of R. L. S. towards Villon. And in those contrite second thoughts prefixed to the essays collected as Familiar Studies of Men and Books, Stevenson re- gretted that he did not leave the presentation of Villon to those who could think well of him where he saw nothing but artistic evil. The essay was first published in the ' Cornhill Magazine,' August 1877. VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE Of the four essays bearing this title (which is given to the volume containing them), Part I, which A BOOK OF R. L. S. 273 may be said to be on courtship, and II, on marriage, are not further defined ; III and IV have the sub- titles On Falling in Love and Truth of Intercourse. I, III, and IV appeared first in the ' Comhill Maga- zine ' for August 1876, February 1877, and May 1879. II did not appear until the publication of the essays in book form in 1881, and might therefore have been written after Stevenson's marriage in 1880. While Stevenson's letters during these years [est. 26 to 31) contain n;uch discussion of his writings, there is but the one slight mention of these papers, viz., * a thing in proof for the Cornhill called Virginibus Puerisque,' in reference to the first of them. The opinion, if it exists, of the mature and married Stevenson on these most widely read essays of his youth should be worth reading. Their popularity has been due no doubt to their fresh, whimsical and, in places, cynical treatment of the perennial problem of marriage. For all his dogmatism, or perhaps because of it, one does not take this light moralizing seriously. Indeed Stevenson makes it clear that his thoughts are meant to provoke remonstrance. He overstates in order to arouse the reader's correction ; and while he paints the perils of the married state, confesses his wonder that so many are happy in it. The manuscripts in Stevenson's hand of I and II of the papers were included in a sale at Christie's on April 22, 1918, in aid of the British Red Cross Society. They were a donation from the widow of Reginald J. Smith, K.C., and were bought by Mr. Sabin for £165. Some notes in the * Times Literary Supple- ment ' of March 7, 1918, describe the revisions of s 274 A BOOK OF R. L. S. these MSS. in Stevenson's hand, and indicate the further corrections of the essays in proof, the latter most probably by the editor of the ' Cornhill,' Leslie Stephen. The volume Virginibus Puerisque, taking its title from the first four papers, was Stevenson's first book of essays, and is made up of writings of this kind from his twenty-fourth to twenty-eighth year. The aim running through the papers, as he relates in the preface, * was to state temperately the behefs of youth as opposed to the contentions of age.' It was conceived to form them into a volume which might have borne the title ' Life at Twenty-Five,' but the later papers were judged out of keeipng with this description — so quickly does youth profess to see the yellow leaf. In addition to the four Virginibus Puerisque papers, the book is published including the essays Crabbed Youth and Age, An Apology for Idlers, Ordered South, Acs Triplex, El Dorado, The English Admirals, Some Portraits by Raeburn, Child's Play, Walking Tours, Pan's Pipes, and A Plea for Gas Lamps. Almost all of these contain an element of autobiography, and are separately considered in these pages. On its first issue by Messrs. Kegan Paul in 1881 the book did not sell well, and in 1884 the copyright and the remainder of the edition were bought in by Stevenson's father and transferred to Messrs. Chatto & Windus. Copies of the first edition, with the imprint of the original publisher, have a value of about £11. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 275 WAIF WOMAN, THE The Icelandic folk-tale in the style of the Sagas was written in Samoa about 1892 [cut. 42), and was intended for inclusion in Island Nights Entertain- ments. But on Mrs. Stevenson's protest the story was withheld and was first published in * Scribner's ' of December 1914, and in book form by Messrs. Chatto & Windus in 1916. In 1915 the original MS., on fourteen folio sheets, entirely in R. L. S.'s handwriting, was sold in New York for $990 (£198). WALKING TOURS A paper which corresponds with a large part of Stevenson's habit of life during the five years (1875-9) when he was free to travel and physically fit for outdoor exercise. During this period he was a great walker ; in Scotland, more in France, less in England and Germany. His biographer has quoted a list, made years afterwards as a relief from illness, of towns where he had stayed the night : fifty in Scotland, seventy-four in France, and forty-six in England. These excursions on foot were many of them made alone ; none was so elaborately conceived as the journey with the donkey in the Cevennes ; few were undertaken in districts so deficient in the common comforts for the traveller. Probably of all these wayfarings the most enjoyed were those in the forest of Fontainebleau, from which Stevenson would return at nightfall to the Siron inn at Barbizon with its congenial company of artists. But the essay, from its praise of the simple pleasures of random travel and tired arrival at some 276 A BOOK OF R. L. S. unfamiliar end, was probably immediately inspired by the Winter's Walk in Carrick and Galloway made in January 1876, and the subject of one of Steven- son's travel pieces. Walking Tours was evidently written between then {cet. 26) and the following June, when it appeared in the ' Cornhill Magazine.' Of it, R. L. S. wrote to Colvin, who had expressed his liking for it : * I like it too ; I think it 's prose ; and I own with contrition I 've not always written prose.' The essay is included in Virginihus Piierisque. WATT, FRANCIS (1849- ) Author of several books of Stevenson interest. The chief of these is ' R. L. S.' (London, Methuen, 1 913), which deals chiefly with the personal and literary relations of Stevenson to Scotland, follows his travels, and discusses his style, verse, plays, religion and character. Mr. Watt's ' Terrors of the Law ' (London, John Lane, 1902) includes a chapter on Lord Braxfield ; and his ' Edinburgh and the Lothians ' (London, Methuen, 1912), in its descrip- tions of Edinburgh past and present, has much to say of Stevenson's place in the annals of his native city. WATT, REV. LAUCHLAN MACLEAN Author of ' The Hills of Home ' (London, Foulis, 1913), half a dozen chapters on Stevenson's asso- ciations with the Pentland country and their in- fluence on his thought. It contains the three essays : Pastoral, An Old Scotch Gardener, 'diid The Manse, A BOOK OF R. L. S. 277 and The Pentland Rising, and is illustrated by re- productions in colour of paintings of Pentland landscapes by Robert Hope, A.R.S.A. VVATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE (1832-1914) An appreciative review of Kidnapped,' by Watts- Dunton in the 'Athenaeum/ was the occasion of a letter to his reviewer in which Stevenson acknow- ledges the defect of construction which strikes even the less critical reader, namely, the beginning of a new story when David and Alan take to the moun- tains after the murder of Glenure. The book, he wrote, ' had to go into the world, one part (as it does seem to me) alive, one part merely galvanized.' On the other hand, he vigorously defended the out- come of the fight on the ' Covenant ' against the charge of improbabihty which Mr. Watts (as he then was) had brought against it. WEIR OF HERMISTON The editorial note by Sir Sidney Colvin which is included in editions of the unfinished romance so fully treats of the plans which Stevenson had for it, of the legal and historical problems which it presented and of the landscape setting of the story, that further comment is superfluous. Stevenson believed the work would be his masterpiece and Braxfield his best character, a judgment which indubitably the finished work would have obtained from the critics ; which indeed the fragment has obtained. If a word may be added it is that the tale as it was left at the time of his death still awaited the full develop- 278 A BOOK OF R. L. S. merit of Braxfield's formidable character. The judge's coarsest jests were kept for the bench of the criminal court. Stevenson would know his com- ment upon an argument that Christianity was an innovation, and that all great men had been re- formers, even our Saviour Himself ; at which Br ax- field chuckled in an undertone ' Muckle he made o' that, he was hanget.' The story as it reached its appointed climax would surely have produced as great a presentation of character as any in literature. Weir of Hermiston was not included in the Edin- burgh edition, but was first published in 1896. A French translation, Hermiston, le juge pendeur, was issued in 1912 (Paris, Albert Bordeaux). Manu- script of the first three chapters was sold at Sotheby's in 1914 for £228, and other drafts, mostly in Steven- son's writing, were sold in New York in 191 5 for $375 (£75). WEIR, MRS.— OF ' WEIR OF HERMISTON ' See ' Stevenson, Jean.' WHITMAN, WALT The writings of the unconventionally rugged preacher and poet were beginning to obtain their very mixed reception about the time that R. L. S., just in the twenties, was passing through the period of his life which in one respect was the most trying of any. In matters of religious belief and social con- vention he found himself at variance from his parents, and particularly from his father, to whom the free- dom of thought which found^expression in teachings A BOOK OF R. L. S. 279 such as Herbert Spencer's was something abhorrent. Amid the perplexities created by this breach of in- tellectual and religious outlook Stevenson found encouragement in the ideals of self-hood, friendship, and democracy, set forth in so strange a form by the American apostle. In a fragment of auto- biography written in 1880, and marking this period of his life by the heading * From Jest to Earnest/ he declares that he dated his new departure from three circumstances — natural growth, the coming of friends, and the study of Walt Whitman.' The writings of Whitman evidently continued to be a study of his for some years not only for his own mental consolation, but with a view to the writing of an essay for publication. This essay, first issued in the ' New Quarterly Magazine,' October 1878, and reprinted in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, fails to betray by scarcely more than a line that Stevenson himself owed anything to Whitman. The fact is that it is not the paper which Stevenson had first written ' full of gratitude for the help that had been given me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the in- trinsic merits of the poems, and conceived in the noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence.' So he confessed in the critical notes of his own work when issuing this and other essays in the book form, four years afterwards. John Addington Sjnnonds, with whom Stevenson afterwards formed a friendship at Davos, has given his version of this revision. In * Walt Whitman : A Study,' published in 1893, and a sympathetic analysis of Whitman's teaching and peculiar genius, he writes : 28o A BOOK OF R. L. S. ' My friend, Mr. R. L. Stevenson, once published a constrained and measured study of Walt Whit- man which struck some of those who read it as frigidly appreciative. He subsequently told me that he had first opened upon the key-note of a glowing panegyric, but felt the pompous absurdity of its exaggeration. He began again, subduing the whole tone of the composition. When the essay was finished in this second style, he became conscious that it misrepresented his own enthusiasm for the teacher who at a critical moment of his youthful life had helped him to discover the right line of conduct.' It may be said with a good deal of truth that Stevenson's essay has outlived its subject. Whit- man's ideal of a world democracy is much with us in these days (1919), but Whitman is remembered by a very few. Others have preached from his texts in this and other spheres of thought as vigor- ously and with infinitely more intelligibilit}^ and grace. Thus Stevenson's paper serves to mark more than anything else his own intellectual kinship, as a young man, with ideas in the social and religious fields which represented much of the ' new thought ' of the latter half of the nineteenth century. At twenty-three his views of life were ministered to by Whitman's wide if obscure creed of individual per- sonality, universal brotherhood, love and liberty. Of Whitman's extraordinary style he showed more tolerance than might be expected in calling it ' a most surprising compound of plain grandeur, senti- mental affectation, and downright nonsense.' A BOOK OF R.L. S. 281 WICK A stay of six weeks, when he was eighteen, in this fishing village ten miles to the south of John o' Groats, remained one of Stevenson's unforgettable memories. It provided the text four years later for the essay On the Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places [q.v.) ; and in that on The Education of an Engineer, written soon after he had left Europe, he pronounced Wick ' one of the meanest of man's towns, and situate certainly in the baldest of God's bays.' He was sent there by his father to study harbour con- struction — with what degree of success the second of the papers cited above eloquently tells. For nearly forty years marine engineers had been vainly labouring there ; and not even the Stevenson firm was able to subject the forces of Nature which opposed them on this wild coast. R. L. S. refers to it in the memoir on his father : * The harbour of Wick, the chief disaster of my father's life, was a failure, the sea proved too strong for man's arts ; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now stands a ruin in that bleak God-forsaken bay.' At Wick R. L. S. lodged in a private hotel on the harbour bar kept by a Mr. Sutherland, and his literary association with the town is the subject of a paper, ' R. L. Stevenson in Wick,' by Margaret H. Roberton in the * Magazine of Wick Literary Society,' Christmas 1903. 282 A BOOK OF R. L. S. WILL O' THE MILL In the pattern of its writing, as perfect as any short work of Stevenson's. It belongs to a time of his life when he was in fairly good health. In the year in which it was written (1877, cet. 27), he was dividing his time pretty equally between France and Scotland, and for a while was in Cornwall. Some of his best short stories, such as A Lodging for the Night and Providence and the Guitar, belong to this period. Will 0' the Mill, however, is unlike them in being a sermon, propounding a timid philosophy of life which perhaps is the last the reader would expect from the author who wrote : * Does not life go down with a better grace, foaming in full body over a precipice than miserably straggling to an end in sandy deltas.' Will, with all his aspirations and ambitions, is a hanger-back, a type with which R. L. S. had not a single thought in common. The explanation, given to him by Stevenson, so Sir Graham Balfour relates, is that in Will 0' the Mill he sought to present in a picturesque form what degree of satisfaction the hanger-back might get from life. It was a kind of experiment in the way of taking an opponent's argument and pursuing it to its logical conclusion. This interpretation re- conciles us to the sense of loss and running-out in the end — Death welcomed by the timid abstinent. The setting of the fable is evidently a valley in Germany or Austria. His biographer says it was drawn from the Brenner Pass which, with others much Hke it, was visited by R. L. S. as a boy with his parents. The tale appeared in ' Comhill Maga- A BOOK OF R. L. S, 283 zine ' of January 1878, and is included in The Merry Men. WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY, A A week's walking tour in January 1876 provided the material of this paper, which was probably written soon afterwards [cet. 25), but was left un- finished. Its first publication was in the ' Illus- trated London News/ Summer Number, 1896, with illustrations by H. Macbeth Raeburn. The paper, which marks a distinct development of the earlier studies of the road, Cockermouth and Keswick and An Autumn Effect, is placed among Essays of Travel. WREATH OF IMMORTELLES, THE Passages in this early sketch of the Greyfriars churchyard anticipate the chapter on the same quiet comer of the city in Edinburgh — Picturesque Notes, written some seven years afterwards. The piece is one of the fragments written in the years 1 870-1, but not published until included in a volume of the Edinburgh edition issued after Stevenson's death. It is now included in the volume Lay Morals. WRECKER, THE The benefit to Stevenson of collaboration with his stepson is plainly greater in this tale of ' strange ways of life ' than in the other two of their joint authorship. It is a big book — much the longest of any Stevens onian work — and is so broken into dis- tinct episodes that it lent itself to independent 284 A BOOK OF R. L. S. ' work by the two writers. Stevenson thus obtained a larger measure of relief from the strain which the maintenance of a long narrative imposed on his low pressure of physical vitality ; and the divided plan of the story made it possible to revise and re-write to a degree which could not be done in the case of the more connected Wrong Box. Their collaboration, as Mr. Lloyd Osboume has let it be known, was in part individual contribution of the pictures in the story ; in part, the closest association of both in perfecting other chapters. Thus, the scenes of art-student life in Paris are wholly Stevenson's ; but Mr. Osbourne declares his authorship of the picnic incidents in San Francisco, of Pinkerton and Dodd's affairs in partnership, of the storm that overtook the ' Norah Creina,' and of the sudden outburst of butchery by the incensed crew of the * Currency Lass.' He tells us that the American Captain * Nares was mine, and Pinkerton to a great degree, and Captain Brown was mine throughout.' Their method, after the whole story had been plotted out and a list of chapters drawn up, was for Mr. Osboume to make a first draft, which was written and re-written by Stevenson and himself in turn, and was further worked over by one or the other of them. The impress of R. L. S. over all The Wrecker came about in this fashion. The degree of revision varied ; Mr. Osbourne mentions, evidently as an extreme instance, the writing and re-writing no less than eleven times of the chapter (XVIL) in which Dodd gains the first clue to the mystery of the wreck. A BOOK OF R. L. S. 285 The tale represents the only occasion on which Stevenson was drawn to adopt the mystery type of novel in which the reader is carried forward by the incidents surrounding a secret which is kept to the last. As explained in the Epilogue, famiharly ad- dressed to his friend, Will H. Low, he had aimed at giving greater realism to this form of story by a more gradual approach to the essence of the yarn. The reader is allowed first to live with the characters for a while instead of stepping with them into their adventures straight on his introduction to them. Hence the first half-dozen chapters, with their scenes in Paris and Edinburgh, are almost without bearing on the incidents afterwards developed, and might well be cited against Stevenson's doctrine that the opening of a story is of a piece with its end. Evidently the Prologue, anticipating Dodd's adven- tures, is used as a device to cast unity over the whole in something of the manner of Mr. Conrad. But the earlier chapters have a special interest in the fact that they contain Stevenson's pictures of the artist's life of the Latin Quarter which, through his friendship with Low, he had seen for himself, but has not elsewhere described. The sketch is a partial one — Stevenson is here not to be ranged with de Koch or Du Maurier — but in his few vivid touches R. L. S. pictures the zest, camaraderie, and the licence of Parisian student life of a period which seems to be some years earlier than that (1875-80) when he was frequently in Paris. The figure of Loudon Dodd is drawn in many re- spects from Low. * Some of his adventures and some 286 A BOOK OF R. L. S. of mine/ wrote R. L. S. to Mrs. Low, in offering the dedication of the book to her husband, ' are agree- ably mingled in the early part,' as may be judged from Low's many reminiscences of Stevenson in ' A Chronicle of Friendships.' In these chapters Stevenson introduces a reference to himself and his cousin R. A. M. S. in the Stennis freres, the ' pair of hare-brained Scots,' who take part in the impromptu trip to Barbizon, and will hear of no baggage but a great-coat and a tooth-brush. ' Stennis ' was the nearest approach to the cousins' name of which the good Siron of the hotel at Barbizon was capable. But for the abortive enterprise of Dodd in under- taking the statue for the capitol of his native town Stevenson toned down, for the sake of credibihty, the case of a would-be member of the artists' com- munity. Miss Simpson in her * Stevenson Originals ' recounts that an American named Pardesous w^as sent to Paris by his father ' to learn to sculp,' in order to carry out contracts for statuary w^hich, by his father's influence, could be placed with him. Romney the down-at-heel painter. Miss Simpson tells us, was one of other characters drawn from the circles in which R. L. S. and her brother had moved in the seventies. By a coincidence the copy of ' Scribner's ' containing the dedication w^hich recalled these echoes of Montpamasse came into Low-'s hands at the table of Lavenue's restaurant, where close on twenty years before he had first sat with R. L. S. The Wrecker, which, after an interval of nearly three years, followed The Master of Ballantrae in ' Scribner's Magazine ' (August 1891 to July 1892), A BOOK OF R.L,S. 287 was written while Stevenson {cet. 39 to 41), with his wife and stepson, were upon their second and third cruises among the Pacific Islands, and during their early residence in Samoa — a period of nearly two years, during much of which time they were beyond touch with civilization. The conception of the tale is told in the Epilogue, viz., its foundation on a pro- position of which Captain Trent's harsh bargain with the castaways was the counterpart. Beyond these public confidences in the ear of his friend Low there is little to show his opinion of the book except a passage to Sir Sidney Colvin : ' The part that is genuinely good is Nares, the American sailor ; that is a genuine figure ; had there been more Nares it would have been a better book ; but of course it didn't set up to be a book, only a long, tough yarn with some pictures of the manners of to-day in the greater world — not the shoddy, sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world where men still live a man's life.' The first edition (Cassell, 1892, 6s.) appeared with illustrations by William Hole and W. L. Metcalf, and has a value of about £1. WRONG BOX, THE It must always be a subject for wonder why Stevenson, whose reputation as a writer was jealously guarded by himself and his friends, should ever have accepted the part of joint-author of this farcical tale. A generous desire for his stepson to share in the benefit of association with himself is the most credible explanation. The tale in the first instance 288 A BOOK OF R. L. S. was written and re-written entirely by Lloyd Osboume, then twenty years of age, at Saranac during the winter of 1887. To Stevenson it ap- peared ' so funny ' that he took it in hand, and in the course of the following year revised it to such an extent that in Mr. Osboume's words ' it lived as it had never lived before/ By the time Stevenson and his party had come on their cruise in the * Casco ' to Honolulu early in 1889 the story had reached a state which prompted R. L. S. to offer it to Scribner's for $5000. The offer was '(not accepted, and The e£ LL .^^ff^^^^^i ^^^ w^s published by Messrs. Longmans in / . June 1889. This first edition of 283 pages has a ^ ^ ^ 1 ^ / ^^value of about i6s. A French translation published S^^^^r^^in 1905 bears the title ' Le Mort Vivant.' YEATS, WILLIAM BUTLER (1865- ) A single letter was sent by Stevenson to Mr. Yeats briefly to express the fascination which a poem of the latter 's had for him. Recalling the spell which Swinburne and Meredith cast over him he wrote : ' It may interest you to know that I have a third time fallen in slavery : this is to your poem the ' Lake Isle of Innisfree.' It is so quaint and airy, simple, artful, and eloquent to the heart — but I seek words in vain. Enough that '' always night and day I hear lake water lapping with slow sounds on the shore." ' YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO The paper on the humble Japanese reformer of the mid-nineteenth century was written at Monterey A BOOK OF R. L. S. 289 California {. Catriona, 46. Appin trial, 9. character of the Lord Advo- cate, no. Celestial Surgeon, The, 5 1 . quotation, 58. Cevennes, 260. Chalmers, Stephen, 52. Character, A, 52. Charity Bazaar, The, 52. Charles of Orleans, 5 1 . Children, Notes on the Movements of 176. Children, relations with, 56. Child's Garden of Verses, A, 53. Child's Play, 57. Christmas at Sea, (ballad), 26. Christinas Sermon, A, 58. Cigarette of An Inland Voyage, 225. Clarisse {Travels with a Donkey), 262. Clergy of the Church of Scotland, An Appeal to the, 8. Cluny's cage {Kidnapped), 140. Cockermoiith and Keszvick, 59. College Magazine, A, ^g. College Memories, Some, 60. ^ Colvin, Sir Sidney, 60. Lady, 227. Conrad, Joseph, on the South Seas book, 233. Cornford, L, Cope. 62. Covenanters, 192. Crabbed Age and Youth, 62. Crockett, S. R., 63. , Cruse, Amy, 64. I Cunningham, Alison (Cummy), v ! 64. I i Damien, Father, An Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde, 67. Darien adventure, the, 116. D'Artagnan, character of, 83. Darwinism, 201. Davos in JVinfer, 72. Davos, papers on, 5, 72, 115, 244. Davos Press, The, 73. Davos, winters at, 71. Day after To-morrow, The, 7^. Deacon Brodie, 74. Death, date of, 216. Debateable Land, 155. Debating Societies, 75. Dedications of books, 76. Dew-Smith, A. G., 78. Dialogue on Character and Des- tifty between Two Puppets, 205. Dobson, Austin, 78. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 2^. Dogs, the Character of, 79. Doyle, Sir A. Conan, 80. opinion of The Pavilion on the Links, 190. Drake, Maurice, memorial by, 95. Drawings of landscape, 176. Dreajns, A Chapter on, 80. Drummond, James MacGregor. See More, James. Dual personality, 156. Duddingstone (early verses), %2. Dumas' s, A Gossip on a Novel of, 82. Dumb alphabet, dictation by, 212. Dynamiter, The, 173. Somerset, original of, 242. Earraid, paper on, 162. in Kidnapped, 140. in The Merry Men, 164. Ebb Tide, The, 83. Attwater, 17, 78- Edinburgh, associations with Ste- venson, 85. Edinburgh : Picturesque Notes, 86. Edinburgh Students in 1824, 90. Edu-cation of an Engineer, The, 90. INDEX 293 v^/ Dorado, 91. % Emigrant, The Amateur, 6. Engineer, The Education of an, 90. Engineers, Records of a Family of 96. England, strangeness in, 100, 214. English Admirals, The, 91, Enjoyment of Unpleasant Places, On the, 92, 281. Envoy (i in Underwoods), 93. Epilogue to an Inland Voyage, 93. ' Equator,' cruise in the, 229. y-j Essays of Travel, 94. Exeter, hotel at, 95. Fables, 95. ^Fables in Song,'' Lytton^s, 153. Falling in Love, On, 273. familiar Studies of Men and Books, 96. Fafnily of Engineers, Records of a, 96. Feast of Famine, T";^^ (ballad), 25. Fenian outrages, attitude to, 174. Ferrier, James Walter, 98. essay on, 1 84. Miss, 98. Fiction, controversy with Henry James, 121. Fife, The Coast of 99. Film versions of tales, 38, 269. Finsbury, Michael, original of, 99. First Book, My {Treasure Island), ' 102. First editions, values of, 228. Fontainebleau, 99. Footnote to History, A, 102. Foreig7ter at Ho77ie, The, 100. Forest Notes [^or)X.2\ri€Q\t7i.\C), loi. Forest State, The (afterwards Prince Otto), 199. Forests, On the Ther?nal Infltience of 256. Eraser, Miss Marie, 105. Simon, Master of Lovat, 105. and the clan Frazer, 13. French versions of works, 201, 250, 288. Gardener, An Old Scotch, 185. T 2 Gas Lamps, A Plea for, 107. Geddie, John, 107. German interests in Samoa, 103. penetration, Marcel Schwob on, 220. Glenure, Colin Campbell of, 11. Gosse, Edmund, 107. in Talk and TalkerSy 256. on R. L. S.'s character in poems, 271. on writing of Treasure Lsland, 265. poems to Stevenson, 36. Gossip on Romance, A, 208. Gower Woodseer, Meredith's par- tial portrait of R. L. S., 163. Grange, Lady, incarceration of, 50. Grant, Barbara {Catriona), as character sketch of R. L. S., 49. William, Lord Advocate, 109. share in James More's escape from prison, 50. Graver and the Pen, The, 73. Great North Road, The, no. Great Missenden, inn at, 20. Greenwood State, The (afterwards Prince Otto), 199. Grift, Nelly van de, 76. Guthrie, Lord, in. Hackston, the Covenanter, 99. Hadden, Tommy, original of, 112. Hamilton, Clayton, 114. Hanging Judge, The (play), 236. Hardy, Thomas, visit to, 95. Hamerton, P. G,, 112. Hammerton, J. A., 113. Health and Motintains, 115. Heather Ale (ballad), 26. Heather cat, 116. Henley, W. E., \\T. and Kipling compared, 141. in Talk and Talkers, 256. on Stevenson's charac- ter, 205. Highlands, Scottish, attitude to, 93. 294 A BOOK OF R. L. S. High Wood of Ulicfauua, The (afterwards Beach of Falesa), 29. Hird, Ben, 119. Honolulu, 120, 135. House of Eld, The (fable), 95. House, The Ideal, 125. Hutchinson, bust by, 121. Hugo's Romances, 121. Humble Remonstrance, A, 121. Hyeres, 123. Ideal House, The, 125. Idlers, An Apology for, 7. Inland Voyage, An, 126. Epilogue, 93. In Mefuoriam, F. A. S., 128. Ireland, Alexander, 128. Irish affairs, 74. Irving, H. B., asjekylland Hyde, 250. Island Nights Entertainments, 129. Isle of Voices, The, 130, James, Henry, 130. controversy with, 121. on the later essays, 3. on Stevenson's health, 114- . 'Janet Nicoll,' cruise in the, 230. Janet Nicoll,' The Cruise of the, by Mrs. R. L. Stevenson, 236. Japp, A. H., 132. and Thoreau, 257. and Treasure Island, 266. ^Jekyll and Hyde, 246. Jenkin, Fleeming, 132, Jersey, Lady, 134. Johnson, Sir William, 160. Johnstone, Arthur, 135. Kay's, General, monument, 89. Kelman, Rev. John, 135. Kidnapped, 136. Alan Breck, 40. Appin murder, 9. Cluny JNIacpherson, 154. defect of construction, 277. Robin Oig, 181. Kipling, Rudyard, 141. Knox, and his Relations to IVomen, 142. Knox, Dr. Robert, anatomist, 36, 89. Lang, Andrew, 142. first impressions of R. L. S., 115. on James More, 171. Lantern Bearers, The, 144. Lay Morals, 144. the book, 145. Le Gallienne, Richard, 146. Leith, Water of, 107. Leper settlement, Molokai, visit to, 120. Letter, Miss Balfour's, engaging servant, 23. Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art, 146. Letters, successive published series, 147. Letters in Advocates' Library, Edinburgh, 1 19. Lie, The Story of a, 245. Lighthouses, On a New Form of Litermittent Light for, 147. L. J. R., 148. Locker- Lampson, Frederick, 149. Lodging for the Night, A, 1 50. London (newspaper), 60, 178. Lord Nelson and the Tar, 73. Lovat, Master of, 105. Love-affairs, 60, 82, 152, 180, 260. Low, Will H., 151. dedication of The Wrecker, 285. Mrs. , translator oijekyll and Hyde, 250. Lyt ton's ^Fables in Song,^ 153. Macaire, 153. Macbeth, Salvini's, 214. McClure, S. S., original of Pin- kerton, 196. syndicate, letters for, 230. Macpherson, Cluny, 154. Maletroifs Door, The Sire of, 226. INDEX 295 Mansfield, Richard, as Jekyll and Hyde, 248. Ma7-giierite, The, 73. AIarkhei??i, 156. opinion of, 183. Manse, The, 155. Marseilles, 124. Masson, Miss Rosaline, 157. \JiIasier of Ballantrae, The, 158. Mattos, Katharine de, 76. 3Iemoir of Fleeming Jenkin, 134. Memorial, Edinburgh, 86, 210. Exeter, 95. San Francisco, 218, Saranac, 52, 218. Silverado, 223. Memories and Portraits, 161. Memories of an Islet ( Earraid) , 1 62. Mentone, 162. Meredith, George, 163. Merry Men, The, 164. Miller, Sheriff, in Catriona, 49. Misadventures of John Nicholson, 166. Modern Cosmopolis, A, i\*j. Modern Student Considered Gener- ally, The, 167. Molokai, visit to leper settlement, 120. Monastier, 175. Money, conception of, 145. Monterey {Old Pacific Capital), 167, 185. Moors, H. J., 168. Moral Emblems, 73. Morality of the Profession of Let- ters, 170. More, James, 170. Government connivance in escape from prison, 50. part in the Appin trial, 13- plan to kidnap Alan Brack, 42. More New Arabian Nights {The Dynamiter), 173. Somerset, original of, 242. Morley, John, commission by, 153- Morris, William, 175. Mountain Town in France (Mona- stier), 175. Movements of Young Children, Notes on, i'j6. Myers, F. W. H., 177. New Arabian Nights, 177. New Poems and Variant Read- ings, 179. Nomenclature, Philosophy of, 194. North, Captain George, pseudo- nym, 34, 267. Not I, and other Poems, y^. Nuits Blanches, 180. Nurses, 181. Object of Pity, An, 135. Oig, Robin, 181. abduction charge, 171. Olalla, 182. Old Mortality, 184. Old Pacific Capital, 185. Old Scotch Gardener, An, 185. Ordered South, 186., Osbourne, Lloyd, 187. and The Wrong Box, **^ 287. in The Silverado Squat- \^ ters, 222. share in The Ebb Tide, '/ share in The Wrecker, , 285. Otir Lady of the Snows (xxiil of Underwoods), 53. Pan's Pipes, 189. Pastoral, 189. Pathos, examples of, 181, 214. Pavilion on the Links, The, 190. Pearl Fisher, The (afterwards The Ebb Tide), 83. Pennell, Joseph, 191. Penny Plain and Twopence Col- oured, A, 191. shop where toy plays bought, 86. Pentland essays, 155, 185, 189. hills, 253. Pentland Rising, The, 192. Pepysy Samuel, 193. Pew in Admiral Guinea, 4. 296 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Phillips, Alfred R., 194. and Treasttre Island, 33- Philosophy of No7nenclature, 194. "^Philosophy of Umbrellas, 195. *" Pilgrim'' s Progress,'' Bagsier's, 21. Pinero, Sir Arthur, 195. Pinkerton, original of, 196. Play, conception of, 57. Plays — Admiral Guinea, 3. Beazi Austin, 30. Deacon Brodie, 75. Hanging Judge, The, 236. Macairc, 153. Henley-Stevenson, Pinero's criticism, 195. editions, 196, 259. Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson, 196. Plea for Gas Lamps, A, 1 07. Poems — Ballads, 25. Child's Garden of Verses, 53. New Poems, 179. Sojigs of Travel, 228. Underwoods, 270. Poems and Variant Readings, New, i-jg. Political views, 174. writings, 74. Portraits of, partial literary, 27, 163. Prayers, 196. Preface to ' The Master of Ball an- trae,' 160. Prelude (early verse), 197. Prideaux, W. F., 197. ^Prince Otto, 197. Prince Otto, original of, 200, 242. Providence and the Guitar, 201. Psychical phenomena, interest in, 80. Pulvis et Umbra, 201. Raeburn, Some Portraits by, 202. Rahero, The Song of ^2^2,6), 25. RajaKs Diamond, The, 178. Raleigh, Sir Walter, 203. on the Damien letter. 67. on Markheim, 157. Random Memories, 203. Realism, A Note on, 204. Reflections and Remarks on Hu- man Life, 204. Remotistrance, A Humble, 121. Requiefn, genesis of, 180. on Stevenson's tomb, 217. Retrospect, A, 205. y Rice, Richard Ashley, 206. Road of the Loving Heart, 213, 216. Roads, 206. Rob and Ben, or the Pirate and the Apothecary, 73. Robertson, J. M., on Stevenson and Burns, 44. Rodin, Auguste, 208. meeting with, 152. Romance, A Gossip on, 208. Rosa quo Locorimi, 209. Rosebery, Lord, on The Master of Ballantrae, 159. Rosen, Countess von, original of, 200. Rowfant Rhymes, contribution to, 149. St. Gaudens, Augustus, 210. St. Ives, 210. origin of Sim and Cand- lish, 190. Salvini's Macbeth, 214. Samoa, 215. Samoan politics, writings on, 102. San Francisco, 217. Saranac (Adirondacks), 218. Satirist, The, 219. Schools in Edinburgh, 86. Schooner Farallone, The (after- wards The Ebb Tide), 83. Schwob, Marcel, 219. on Villon,. 271. Scott's novels, order of preference, 209. Scribner, Charles, 220. Semiramis (afterwards Prince Otto), 190. Sentimental Tommy, partial por- trait of R. L. S., 27. Sermon, A Christmas, 58. Sharp, Archbishop, 99. William, 221. INDEX 297 Shelley, Sir Percy and Lady, 221. Silver, John, original of, 222. Silverado Squatters, The, 222. Simoneau, M., 168. Simpson, Miss Eve Blantyre, 224. Sir Walter, 225. Sire of Maletroifs Door, The, 226. Sitwell, Mrs. (Lady Colvin), 227. verses to, 128. Sixfoot Club, 214. Skelt's toy theatre, 191. Skerryvore, home at Bournemouth, 39- lighthouse, 235. Slater, J. Herbert, 228. Somerset, original of, 242. Songs of Travel, 228. Song of Raker 0, T/^^ (ballad), 25. Smith, Dr., of Galston (great- grandfather), 25. South Sea Cruises, 229. South Seas, In the, 230. Speculative Society, 75, 86. Stennis brothers {The Wrecker), 242, 286. Stephen, Leslie, 234. early estimate of R. L. S., 121. Henley and R. L. S., 117. Stevenson, Alan (great-grand- father, 156. (uncle), 235. Fanny van de Grift (wife), 235- first pen portrait ( W ill H. Low), 152. share in The Dynamiter^ ^73- Jean (grandmother), 237. M. L (mother), 238. Robert (grandfather), 240. R. A. M. (cousin), 241. as Prince Otto, 200. games of make-believe with R. L. S., 57. Thomas (father), 242. paper on, 244. share in Treasure Is- land, 266. Stevensons, unfinished history of, 97- Stewart, Alan Breck. See Breck, Alan. James, of the Glen, trial and sentence, 10. guardian of Alan Breck, 41. Stimulation of the Alps, The, 244. Stoddard, Charles Warren, 245. Stoneven, L. S., pseudonym, 207. Story of a Lie, The, 245. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 246. F. W. H. Myers on, 177. Strong, Austin, 250. Isobel (sister-in-law), 250. i^ Stubbs, Laura, 252. Style in Literature, On Some Technical Eleynents of, T-^z. Sziicide Club, The, 178. Swanston, 253. Cottage, Stevensonian col- lection, 66, III, 253. Sweet Singers, The, 87. Swinnerton, Frank, 254. ■ on Olalla, 184. on The English Ad- mirals, 91. on The Master of Ball- antrae, 160. on The Silverado Squut- ters, 224. Symonds, John Addington, 254. on Stevenson and Whit- man, 279. Tales a7id Fantasies, 255. Talk and Talkers, 256. genesis of, 19. Talk, later life, resemblance to early writings, 145. Terry, Fred, in Beau Austin, 31. Thermal Influence of Forests, On the, 256. Thomas, Brandon, in Deacon Brodie, 74. Thoreau, Henry David, 257. Thrawn Jantt , 258. 298 A BOOK OF R. L. S. Thrawn Janet ^ opinion of, 47. Three Plays, 259. Ticotideroga (ballad), 25. Tod Lapraik, story in Catriona, AT- Todd, John, 190. Travel, Essays of, 94. Travel^ Songs of, 228. Travelling Cotnpamon, The, 247. Travels in Europe, 275. ^ Travels with a Donkey in the "' Cevennes, 259. Treasure Island, 263, "^ Andrew Lang on, 143. paper on, 102. Pew, in Admiral Gui- nea, 4. Treasure of Franc hard. The, 269. Tree, Beerbohm, in Beaii Austin, 31- Trudeau, Dr. E. L., 52, 219. Truth of Intercourse, 273. Tushery, 12>' Typee, island of (Nukahiva), 229. Utna (afterwards Beach of Falesa), ^'^^'30. Umbrellas, Philosophy of, 195. Underwoods, 270, I (Envoy), 93. Ill, continuation of, 46. XI ('Youth now flees'), 210. XXII {The Celestial Sur- geon), 51, 58. XXIII (Oitr Lady of the Snows), 53. XXIV ('Not yet, my Soul'), 51- XXVII [In Memoriam, F. A. S.), 128. United States, publisher in, 220, I Unpleasant Places, On the Enjoy- } ment of, 92, 281. ; Vailima, meaning of name, 215. \ Vicomte de Bragelonne, 82. ! Villon, Francois, paper on, 271. i story of, 1 50. I Virginibus Puerisgue, 272. .,_ j --' I I IVazf Woman, The, 275. 1 Walking Tours, 275. 5 I Watt, Francis, 276. I Rev. L. M., 276. I Watts- Dunton, Theodore, 277. Weir of Her mist on, 277- dictation of, 251. Weir, Mrs., original of, 237. Major, 89. Wendover, inn at, 20. Whitman, W^alt, 278. Wick, 281. Will 0' the Mill, 282. Winter's Walk in Car rick and Galloway, A, 283. Wreath of Immortelles, TJie, 283. and Old Mortality, 184. Wrecker, The, 283. C. W . Stoddard in, 245.'' Hadden, original of, 112. Pinkerton, original of, 196. Writing, Essays in the Art of IJ. Wrong Box, The, 287. / Finsbury, original of, "^ 99. Yeats, W. B., 288. Yellow Paint, The (fable), 95. Yoshida- Torajiro, 288. Young Chevalier, The, 289. Youth, Crabbed Age and, 62. Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press r^ Hi THTS? BOOK IS DUE ON THF "^ * STAMPEJ> ^T"- •A!. 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. k&