Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1053 page)

Of Mrs. Thomas Stevenson not a line of any sketch remains among the work of her son: a want easily explained by the fact that she survived him. It is the more necessary to supply in some measure this deficiency, as the warmth of Louis’ gratitude to his nurse has unjustly reacted to the prejudice of his mother, and has quite wrongly been supposed by those who did not know them to indicate neglect on one side and on the other a lack of affection.

In person she was tall, slender, and graceful; and her face and fair complexion retained their beauty, as her figure and walk preserved their elasticity, to the last. Her vivacity and brightness were most attractive; she made on strangers a quick and lasting impression, and the letters written on the news of her death attest the devotion and number of her friends. As a hostess she had great social tact, and her hospitality was but the expression of her true kindliness of heart.

Her undaunted spirit led her when nearly sixty to accompany her son, first to America, and then, in a racing schooner, through the remotest groups of the Pacific, finally to settle with him in the disturbed spot where he had chosen his home.

She had in the highest degree that readiness for enjoyment which makes light of discomfort, and turns into a holiday any break of settled routine. Her desire to be pleased, her prompt interest in any experience, however new or unexpected, her resolute refusal to see the unpleasant side of things, all had their counterpart in her son, enabling him to pass through the many dark hours that would have borne far more heavily upon his father’s temperament.

Frail though his own constitution was, his early visits to various health-resorts were due in the first instance to the need of securing a better climate for his mother, who unfortunately fell into ill-health during the ten or twelve years of his boyhood. When he was ailing, she was often ill at the same time, and was frequently disabled from performing for him the services it would have been her greatest delight to render.

But of her devotion and of her incessant thought for the boy there can be no question. I have before me as I write a series of pocket-diaries, complete (but for the second year) from 1851 until the year of her death. The earlier books are occupied exclusively with her husband and her child, and in the later volumes these two are still the staple of her entries. Louis’ place in class is scrupulously noted, and that, we may be sure, with no encouragement from his father. When he was small, she read to him a great deal, and to her he owed his first acquaintance with much that is best in literature. Almost every scrap of his writing that ever passed into her hands was treasured. His first efforts at tales or histories, taken down by herself, or some other amanuensis, before he was able or willing to write; nearly every letter he ever sent her; every compliment to him, and every word of praise — all were carefully preserved, long before he showed any definite promise of becoming famous; and by her method and accuracy she was able to record for his biographer, with hardly an exception, where he spent each month of his life. The story of almost the only letter she did not keep bears so directly on her character that I must set it down in her words. ‘ In the spring of 1872 Louis was in a very depressed state; he wrote one terribly morbid letter to me from Dunblane, all about death and churchyards — it vexed me so much that I put it in the fire at once. Years after, when he was writing his essay Old Mortality, he applied to me for that letter, and was quite vexed when I told him that I had destroyed it.’

The son’s attachment to his mother was no less deep and lasting. The earliest record of it goes back to his very infancy, when, at three years old, he was left alone with her one day in the dining-room after dinner. He had seen his nurse cover her mistress with a shawl at such times; so he took a doyley off the table, unfolded it, and carefully spread it over her, saying, ‘That’s a wee bittie, Mama.’ Another speech of his two years later was, ‘ I’m going to call you “Mother” sometimes, just that I may remember to do it when I’m a big man.’ And he ended the same day with ‘Good-night, my jewelest of mothers.’ This loving attention to her continued during his whole life. Through all her illnesses and whenever she needed his care, he was always most sedulous and affectionate, displaying at times a tenderness almost feminine. The most irregular of correspondents, he was well-nigh regular to her; master of his pen though he was, several times after he had become a man of letters he bursts out into impatience at the difficulty he finds in expressing to her and to his father the depth of his affection and gratitude to them both. He kept numbers of her letters, even of those received during the most migratory periods of his life; and soon after his marriage, though his wife was the most devoted and capable of nurses, on the outbreak of an illness, like a child he turned to his mother and would be satisfied with nothing short of her presence.

After his father’s death, when the doctors had ordered him to go to America, if he wanted to live, he wrote to her: ‘ Not only would we not go to America without you; we should not persist in trying it, if we did not believe that it would be on the whole the best for you.’ From that time, but for two absences in Scotland, she made her home with him and his family, and had the reward of realising that the exile which severed him from so many of his friends had brought her to an even more intimate knowledge of his life and an even closer place in his affection.

CHAPTER III

INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD — 1850-59

‘I please myself often by saying that I had a Covenanting childhood.’ — R. L. S., MS. fragment.

‘I am one of the few people in the world who do not forget their own lives.’ — R. L. S., Letters, ii. 107.

Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson was born at No. 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, on the 13th November 1850, and a few days after his birth was baptized by his grandfather, the minister of Colinton, according to the Scots custom, in his father’s house. He was called after his two grandfathers, and to their names that of his mother’s family was added.1

1 It was as Robert Louis Stevenson that he was known to all the world, and the earlier variations of his name, remembered but by few, are of small importance. Nevertheless it may be as well to set them down here.

His birthplace was the home which Thomas Stevenson had prepared for his bride two years before; a small, unpretentious, comfortable stone house, forming part of a row still standing, situated on low ground just to the north of the Water of Leith. Two and a half years later this was changed for No. I Inverleith Terrace, a more commodious dwelling on the other side of the same road; but that, having three outside walls, proved too cold for the delicate boy. Accordingly, in 1857, the little family of three — for Louis remained an only child — moved half a mile further south into what was then the centre of the New Town, and occupied No. 17 Heriot Row, which continued to be their home in Edinburgh for thirty years. This was a substantial house of grey stone, built with the solidity so customary in Scotland and so unusual in the South, looking across the Queen Street Gardens, where the lilacs bloomed in spring and the pipe of the blackbird might be heard; while from its back windows could be seen the hills of ‘ the kingdom of Fife.’

For the first year of his life the infant seemed healthy and made satisfactory progress. He climbed a stair of eighteen steps at nine months, at eleven months walked freely, and in two months more called people by their names. But with his mother’s brightness of disposition he had unfortunately inherited also from her a weakness of chest and a susceptibility to cold, which affected the whole course of his life. When he was a little over two he had a severe attack of croup, and from that time until he was eleven, there was no year in which he was not many days in bed from illness — bronchitis, pneumonia, feverish cold, or chills affecting his digestion, as well as one severe gastric fever, and all the ordinary maladies of childhood in rapid succession. In the summer months he kept fairly well, and was then for most of his time away from Edinburgh at Portobello, Lasswade, Bridge of Allan, Burntisland, North Berwick, Aberdour, or some other of the Edinburgh summer resorts as yet frequented by few visitors. It was to the manse at Colinton, however, that he most frequently went until the death of his grandfather in 1860, and it was here, as we shall see, that the happiest days of his childhood were passed.

Of his earliest memories he speaks thus: —

‘I remember with particular pleasure running upstairs in Inverleith Terrace with my mother — herself little more than a girl — to the top flat of this our second house, both of us singing as best we could “We’ll all go up to Gatty’s room, to Gatty’s room, etc.,” ad lib.; Gatty being contracted for Grandpapa, my mother’s father, who was coming to stay with us. I mention that because it stands out in stronger relief than any other recollection of the same age. I have a great belief in these vivid recollections: things that impress us so forcibly as to become stereotyped for life have not done so for nothing.

‘Ibelieve I was what is called a good child: I learned large passages of Scripture and hymns, and recited them, I understand, with very good action and emphasis. After I was in bed I used to be heard lying awake and repeating to myself — crooning over to myself in the dark — certain curious rambling effusions, which I called my “ songstries.” One of these, which was taken down by my father, who stood outside the door for the purpose, I have seen; it was in a sort of rhythmic prose, curiously approximating to ten-syllable blank verse, and was religious in its bearing; I think it is now lost.’1

The following appears to be the songstry in question:2 it is dated April 23rd, 1857: —

‘ Had not an angel got the pride of man, No evil thought, no hardened heart would have been seen.

No hell to go to, but a heaven so pure; That angel was the Devil.

Had not that angel got the pride, there would have been no need For Jesus Christ to die upon the cross.

‘ That I was eminently religious, there can be no doubt. I had an extreme terror of Hell, implanted in me, I suppose, by my good nurse, which used to haunt me terribly on stormy nights, when the wind had broken loose and was going about the town like a bedlamite. I remember that the noises on such occasions always grouped themselves for me into the sound of a horseman, or rather a succession of horsemen, riding furiously past the bottom of the street and away up the hill into town; I think even now that I hear the terrible howl of his passage, and the clinking that I used to attribute to his bit arid stirrups. On such nights I would lie awake and pray and cry, until I prayed and cried myself asleep; and if I can form any notion of what an earnest prayer should be, I imagine that mine were such.3 . . .

‘ All this time, be it borne in mind, my health was of

1     Unpublished ms., dated 18th May 1873.

2     There is a singular parallel at an even earlier age in the Life of Charles Kingsley.

3     Cf. ‘ Nuits Blanches,’ Juvenilia, p. 35.

the most precarious description. Many winters I never crossed the threshold; but used to lie on my face on the nursery floor, chalking or painting in water-colours the pictures in the illustrated newspapers; or sit up in bed, with a little shawl pinned about my shoulders, to play with bricks or whatnot. I remember the pleasant maternal casuistry by which I was allowed to retain my playthings of a Sunday, when a pack was sewn on to the back of one of the wooden figures, and I had then duly promised to play at nothing but “Pilgrim’s Progress.” . . . Although I was never done drawing and painting, and even kept on doing so until I was seventeen or eighteen, I never had any real pictorial vision, and instead of trying to represent what I saw, was merely imitating the general appearance of other people’s representations. I never drew a picture of anything that was before me, but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I beautifully illustrated my lack of real feeling for art, by a very early speech, which I have had repeated to me by my mother: “ Mamma,” said I, “ I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?”

‘My ill-health principally chronicles itself by the terrible long nights that I lay awake, troubled continually with a hacking, exhausting cough, and praying for sleep or morning from the bottom of my shaken little body. I principally connect these nights, however, with our third house, in Heriot Row; and cannot mention them without a grateful testimony to the unwearied sympathy and long- suffering displayed to me on a hundred such occasions by my good nurse. It seems to me that I should have died if I had been left there alone to cough and weary in the darkness. How well I remember her lifting me out of bed, carrying me to the window, and showing me one or two lit windows up in Queen Street across the dark belt of gardens; where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses waiting, like us, for the morning.1 Other night scenes connected with my ill-health were the little sallies of delirium that used to waken me out of a feverish sleep, in such agony of terror as, thank God, I have never suffered since. My father had generally to come up and sit by my bedside, and feign conversations with guards or coachmen or innkeepers, until I was gradually quieted and brought to myself; but it was long after one of those paroxysms before I could bear to be left alone.’

When Louis was a little child, he accidentally locked himself into a room alone one day. He could not turn the key again as he was directed; darkness was coming on, and his terror became extreme. His father sent for a locksmith to open the door, and during the period of waiting talked to Louis through the keyhole, the child becoming so engrossed by the charm of his father’s conversation that he forgot all his fears.

His nurse was, it will already be seen, even more than is usual with children, an important factor in his life. When he was eighteen months old, Alison Cunningham — ’ Cummie’ to him for the rest of his days — came to him and watched over his childhood with the most intense devotion. She refused, it is said, an offer of marriage, that she might not have to leave her charge, and she remained with the family long after the care of him had passed out of women’s hands, never taking another