Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1058 page)

At his last school and in his home circle he was always starting magazines. These were all in manuscript, generally illustrated with profusion of colour, and were sometimes circulated at a charge of one penny for reading. The Schoolboys’ Magazine of 1863, of which one number survives, contained four stories, and its readers must have been hard to satisfy if they did not have their fill of horrors. In the first tale,’ The Adventures of Jan van Steen,’ the hero is left hidden in a boiler under which a fire is lit. The second is 4 A Ghost Story’ of robbers in a deserted castle in ‘ one of those barren places called plains in the north of Norway.’ A traveller finds a man, ‘half killed with several wounds,’ hidden under the floor, who dresses up as a ghost. The third story is called, by a curious anticipation,’ The Wreckers.’

1 ‘ Rosa quo Locorum’: Juvenilia, p. 310.

VOL. I.      E

On the shore at North Berwick ‘were two men. The older and stronger of the two was a tall, ill-looking man with grizzled hair and a red nose. He was dressed in a tarnished gold-laced blue coat, a red waistcoat,and leggings. The other, who might have been a fisherman except for the fact that from each of the pockets of his pea-jacket there projected a pistol. He was a more villainous-looking fellow than the other. “ Dan,” said the first, “what is that clinging to that mast?” “I think,” said the other, “it is a sailor. You had better go and secure him.”‘ Last and not least terrible is ‘ Creek Island, or Adventures in the South Seas.’ A line-of-battle ship called the Shark is wrecked in the Southern Ocean on its way to India, and two midshipmen fall into the hands of the Indians. ‘ They had a council which pronounced death, but which death would we have to suffer? It was to be burned alive. . . . Next morning very early we had to get up and prepare to be burned alive. When we arrived at the place of execution, we shuddered to think of being killed so soon. But I forgot to tell you that I had made love to [sic] beautiful girl even in one day, and from all I knew she loved me. The next thing they did was to build round us sticks and rubbish of all kinds till we could hardly see what they were doing. At last they finished. They then set fire to it, and after it had got hold well, they began to dance, which is called a war-dance. (To be continued.)’

‘ I forgot to tell you that I had made love to beautiful girl! * Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ At least the author remembered his own boyish taste, when heroines were excluded from Treasure Island. And yet this was the hand that at the last drew Barbara Grant and the two Kirstie Elliotts.

The Schoolboys Magazine is, to say the least, lively reading; not so much may be claimed for ‘ The Sunbeam Magazine, an illustrated Miscellany of Fact, Fiction, and Fun, edited by R. L. Stevenson,’ which expired in the middle of its third number in March, 1866. Each number contained several stories and articles, some evidently by other hands. The chief story, ‘The Banker’s Ward, a modern tale,’ is clearly by the editor, but is a dreary and unpromising narrative of middle-class life.

In these days he had endless talks with Mr. Baildon, who seems to have been the first of his friends in whom he found a kindred interest in letters, and at one of these discussions he produced a drama which was apparently the earliest draft of Deacon Brodie. The story was familiar to him from childhood, as a cabinet made by the Deacon himself formed part of the furniture of his nursery. His deepest and most lasting interest was, however, centred in the Covenanters, of whom he had first learned from his nurse. He has told us how his attention was fixed on Hackston of Rathillet, who sat on horseback ‘ with the cloak about his mouth,’ watching the assassination of Archbishop Sharp, in which he would take no part, lest it should be attributed to his private quarrel. Stevenson’s first novel on the subject was attempted before he was fifteen, and ‘reams of paper,’ then and at a later date, were devoted to it in vain.1

A similar fate attended a novel on the Pentland Rising — an episode well known to him from his infancy, as the Covenanters had spent the night before their defeat in the village of Colinton.

This last composition, however, was not wholly without result. Though the novel was destroyed, his studies issued in a small green pamphlet, entitled, The Pentland Rising: a Page of History, 1666, published anonymously, in 1866, by Andrew Elliot in Edinburgh.2

Miss Jane Balfour writes: ‘ I was at Heriot Row in 1866 from the 29th October to 23rd November, and Louis was busily altering the Pentland Rising then to please his father. He had made a story of it, and by so doing, 1            Additional Memories, p. 297.

2     List of Stevenson’s works, Appendix F, vol. ii. p. 211.

had, in his father’s opinion, spoiled it It was printed not long after in a small edition, and Mr. Stevenson very soon bought all the copies in, as far as was possible.’

Thus the period closes somewhat surprisingly with Stevenson’s first appearance as a printed author. The foundations were being well laid, but the structure raised upon them was premature. The publication was probably due to his father’s approval of the subject-matter rather than to any belief in the literary ripeness of the style. At the same time, it was the best work that he had yet done, and the plentiful quotations from the pages of Wodrow and Kirkton, and of their opponent, Sir James Turner, are interesting in view of Stevenson’s confession in Samoa,14 My style is from the Covenanting writers.’

1 Letters, ii. 312.

CHAPTER V

STUDENT DAYS — 1867-73

1 Light foot, and tight foot, And green grass spread, Early in the morning, But hope is on ahead.’

R. L. S.

The time had come for the boy to leave school, and for his education to be shaped in some conformity with the profession supposed to lie before him. What this would be was never for a moment in doubt. Father and sons, the Stevensons were civil engineers, and to the grandsons naturally, in course of time, the business would be transferred. The family capacity for the work, though undeniable, was very elusive, consisting chiefly of a sort of instinct for dealing with the forces of nature, and seldom manifested clearly till called forth in actual practice. The latest recruit had certainly shown no conspicuous powers at any of his schools, but to such a criterion no one could have attached less value than his father. That he did possess the family gift was proved before he left the profession; but even had he never written his paper ‘On a New Form of Intermittent Light,’ no one could reasonably have condemned on his behalf the choice of this career.

Accordingly, the next three and a half years were devoted to his preparation for this employment. He spent the winter and sometimes the summer sessions at the University of Edinburgh, working for a Science degree, and saw something of the practical work of engineering during the other summer months.

For the first two years he attended the Latin class, Greek being abandoned as hopeless after the first session; to Natural Philosophy he was constant, so far as his constancy in such matters ever went; Mathematics then replaced Greek, and Civil Engineering took the room of Latin. But all this was none of his real education. Although he remembered that ‘the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic Stability’ (one of the few facts recorded in a still surviving notebook), and that ‘ Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor Stillicide a crime,’ and would not willingly part with such scraps of science, he never ‘ set the same store by them as by certain other odds and ends that he came by in the open street while he was playing truant.’ The last word recurs with every reference to his education. In fact, as far as the University was concerned, he ‘ acted upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost him a great deal of trouble to put in exercise’; and ‘ no one ever played the truant with more deliberate care, and none ever had more certificates (of attendance) for less education.’

Nor was the attention he bestowed on engineering any more assiduous. As for his practical instruction, he followed out his father’s views on training — that it was waste of time for an engineer to attempt to be a craftsman in any one trade, but that he should become familiar in ‘ shops’ and yards with the materials used in his work, and should learn their employment in practice.

In the summer of 1868 Stevenson spent the month of July at Anstruther, and the six weeks following at Wick: records of which he has left in various letters written to his parents at the time, and in the essay on ‘Random Memories’ entitled ‘ The Education of an Engineer.’ In the first-named place he was privileged to hear it said of him for the first time, ‘That’s the man that’s in charge.’

At Wick, besides his descent in a diving-suit (• one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer’), an accident afforded him one of those opportunities for prompt action, of which his life contained all too few. It comes as the postscript to a short business letter to his father.

‘September 1868.

‘PS. — I was forgetting my only news. A man fell off the staging this forenoon. I heard crying, and ran out to the end. By that time a rope had been lowered and the man was holding himself up by it, and of course wearing himself out. Some were away for a boat. “ Hold on, Angus,” they cried. “ I can NOT do it,” he said, with wonderful composure. I told them to lower a plank; everybody was too busy giving advice to listen to me; meantime the man was drowning. I was desperate, and could have knocked another dozen off. One fellow, Bain, a diver, listened to me. We got the plank out and a rope round it; but they would not help us to lower it down. At last we got assistance, and were just about to lower it down, when some one cried, “ Hold your hand, lads! Here comes the boat.” And Angus was borne safely in. But my hand shook so, that I could not draw for some time after with the excitement. — R. S.’

He had some rough experience, but was apparently none the worse for it. ‘ Wick, September 1868. — I have had a long, hard day’s work in cold, wind, and almost incessant rain. . . . We got a lighter and a boat, and were out till half-past seven, doing labourers’ work, pulling, hauling, and tugging. It was past eight before I got dinner, as I was soaking, and bathed with mud to the ears; but, beyond being tired with the unusual exertion, I am all right now.’

The following year he went with his father in the Pharos, the steamer of the Commissioners of Northern Lights, to Shetland, a part of the same cruise as that on which his grandfather had attended Sir Walter Scott.

He treasured the memories of this time, but the record contained in his letters is somewhat disappointing. It was years afterwards that mentioning a boat-cloak, the use of which belonged chiefly to these days, he said: 4 The proudest moments of my life have been passed in the stern-sheets of a boat with that romantic garment about my shoulders. This, without prejudice to one glorious day when, standing upon some water-stairs at Lerwick, I signalled with a pocket-handkerchief for a boat to come ashore for me. I was then aged fifteen or sixteen [eighteen]. Conceive my glory.’

In 1870, besides a week at Dunoon, to look after some work that was being done there, and one or two expeditions with the University Engineering class, he spent three weeks on the little island of Earraid, off Mull, the scene of David Balfour’s shipwreck, commemorated also in Memories and Portraits, but then in use as headquarters for the building of the deep-sea lighthouse of Dhu Heartach.

All this was the attractive part of his work. ‘ As a way of life,’ he wrote, ‘ I wish to speak with sympathy of my education as an engineer. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if he ever had one) for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an office. From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes 1 to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be 1 This also was his own experience.

sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, and, for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.’1

But even the open-air life had only a very slight hold upon him, as far as it was devoted to professional work. Nothing could be more convincing than the little picture of his father and himself, given in the Family of Engineers.2

‘ My father would pass hours on the beach, brooding over the waves, counting them, noting their least deflection, noting when they broke. On Tweedside, or by Lyne and Manor, we have spent together whole afternoons; to me, at the time, extremely wearisome; to him, as I am now sorry to think, extremely mortifying. The river was to me a pretty and various spectacle; I could not see — I could not be made to see — it otherwise. To my father it was a chequer-board of lively forces, which he traced from pool to shallow with minute appreciation and enduring interest. “ That bank was being undercut,” he might say. “ Why? Suppose you were to put a groin out here, would not the filum fluminis be cast abruptly off across the channel? and where would it impinge upon the other shore? and what would be the result? Or suppose you were to blast that boulder, what would happen? Follow it — use the eyes that God has given you: can you not see that a great deal of land would be reclaimed upon this side? “ It was to me like school in holidays; but to him, until I had worn him out with my invincible triviality, a delight.’

Meanwhile his life was surrounded by the ordinary material comforts belonging to his class, and the customary diversions of society were open to him, had he found them at all to his taste.

In Heriot Row he had now for his own use the two rooms on the top floor of his father’s house, which had been his nurseries. The smaller chamber, to the east, 1 Additional Memories and Portraits, p. 313.          2 P. 266.