Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1064 page)

It might seem that the list of Stevenson’s friends already included as many as one man could retain in intimate relation; but for these two, and others yet to come, there was ample room. A few years after this he questions whether any one on this earth be so wealthy as to have a dozen friends, and indeed the doubt is permissible to most of us unless we knew Stevenson. Only six months before, in one of the morbid moods he was gradually putting behind him, as he sloughed the unhappiness of his youth, he had written down the chief desires of his heart. 4 First, good health: secondly, a small competence: and thirdly, O Du Lieber Gott! friends.’ Seldom was any prayer more fully answered than this last petition. Had he but known, the means of gaining it were already within his hands in a measure rarely granted to any man. At this very time, Mr. Colvin tells us,14 his social charm was already at its height. He was passing through a period of neatness between two of Bohemian carelessness as to dress, and so its effect was immediate.’ But indeed at any time he ‘had only to speak in order to be recognised in the first minute for a witty and charming gentleman, and within the first five for a master spirit and man of genius.’

At all events, by his hosts and by his fellow-guests his attraction was quickly felt, and the month of August, which passed away with no other episodes than a croquet party or a school feast, was nevertheless a landmark in his career.

From Suffolk he returned to Swanston with increased confidence and raised hopes, and at once plunged into work. The essay on ‘ Roads’ was completed and sent to the Saturday Review, and he began a paper on ‘Walt Whitman.’2

1     Letters, i. 45j xxxix, xl.

2     It was this article that he afterwards described: — ’ I had written another paper full of gratitude for the help that had been given me in my life, full of enthusiasm for the intrinsic merit of the poems, and conceived in the noisiest extreme of youthful eloquence.’ — Preface to Familiar Studies.

But the preceding winter had tried him in mind and body, and he was now further weakened by a severe attack of diphtheria. In February his father had come across a draft of the constitution of the L. J. R. (p. 90), and had taken the society as seriously as the youngest of its members could have wished. The acute misunderstanding was limited to part of this year, and then by degrees it passed away. When Mr. Stevenson had determined beforehand on any course of action, he would throw himself into the part he had proposed with an energy and emphasis which were often, unconsciously to himself, far in excess of the situation or of the words he had intended to employ. ‘ I have the family failing of taking strong views/ he had written to his future wife in 1848, ‘and of expressing those views strongly.’ A scene with him was no figure of words: he suffered the extreme of the emotions he depicted; and the knowledge and fear of this result made any difference between them very painful to his son. The differences arose, or threatened to arise again, the winter was coming on, and Louis’ work came to an end.

An idea had arisen that he might be called not to the Scottish, but to the English Bar; and as his hopes were now directed towards London, the scheme was very welcome. To London accordingly he went in the last week of October with a view of entering one of the Inns of Court and passing the preliminary examination, if he could convince the examiners. The scheme was quickly laid aside. His friends in town found him so unwell that they at once insisted on his seeing Dr. (afterwards Sir Andrew) Clark. The diagnosis was plain — nervous exhaustion with a threatening of phthisis: the prescription was chiefly mental — a winter in the Riviera by himself, and in complete freedom from anxiety or worry. His mother came and saw him off, and on the 5th of November he started for Mentone, three weeks before his article on ‘ Roads’ had appeared in the Portfolio, of which P. G. Hamerton was editor.

VOL. 1.      H

How he sat in the sun and read George Sand his letters tell us; and all that he thought and felt and saw during the first six weeks was written down next spring in Ordered South: a paper ‘ not particularly well written/ he thought, but ‘scrupulously correct.’ In the meantime, in ‘numbness of spirit’ he rested and recovered strength. It was one of the halting-places of life, and there he sat by the wayside to recruit and prepare for a fresh advance. Mrs. Sitwell’s letters brightened his solitude, as they had already cheered and helped him in Edinburgh. His answers to her show better than any analysis or description the solace and the strength which came to him from her hands. To overcome depression, to realise a due proportion in the troubles of youth, to surmount the passing moods of immaturity — all this falls more or less to the lot of every man. It is the good fortune of some to receive in this crisis that service which it is generally beyond the power of a man to bestow, and which is possible only for the few women who combine a quick intelligence and a knowledge of the world with charm of temperament and intuition heightened by sympathy.

In his hotel at Mentone Stevenson made the acquaintance of two or three congenial people, who lent him Clough and other books which he read with interest; but as yet he was too weak for any serious reading, and was hardly fit for the exertion of talking to strangers. His internal struggles were of course not at an end, although he found them for the time less harassing; his moral doubts changed with his position, and took on a new phase. His own account, of which I have already quoted a part, after mentioning the circumstances of his being sent abroad for his health, thus continues: —

‘ In the meantime you must hear how my friend acted. Like many invalids he supposed that he would die. Now should he die, he saw no means of repaying this huge loan which, by the hands of his father, mankind had advanced him for his sickness. In that case it would be lost money. So he determined that the advance should be as small as possible; and, so long as he continued to doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room, and grudged himself all but necessaries. But so soon as he began to perceive a change for the better, he felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and brighten his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a help to mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a help to him.’1

In April he described the course of his recovery to his mother in similar terms. ‘ I just noticed last night a curious example of how I have changed since I have been a little better: I burn two candles every night now; for long, I never lit but one, and when my eyes were too weary to read any more, I put even that out and sat in the dark. Any prospect of recovery changed all that.’

By the middle of December one stage of his convalescence was already made. He was now to experience another advantage of his newly formed friendships, as Mr. Colvin joined him at Mentone, and supplied the intimate conversation and discussion which had become his chief need. There was no great change in his life; they passed the time quietly enough, together or apart, as the fancy took them; reading Woodstock aloud, or plunged in talk on any or all subjects; sitting in the olive yards or in a boat, basking in the sun; or in ‘some nook upon St. Martin’s Cape, haunted by the voice of breakers, and fragrant with the threefold sweetness of the rosemary and the sea pines and the sea.’

For a few days they went to Monte Carlo, where they ‘produced the effect of something unnatural upon the people,’ because where everybody gambled all night, they spent their evenings at home; but they soon returned to Mentone, and there in the hotel to which the chance of 1 ‘ Lay Morals’: Juvenilia, p. 331. accommodation brought them, were fortunate in finding a small but very cosmopolitan society, which greatly brightened Stevenson’s stay, when his companion had to leave him. The chief members of this little coterie were a Georgian lady and her sister with two little daughters; M. Robinet, a French painter; and an American and his wife and child,4 one of the best story-tellers in the world, a man who can make a whole table-d’h6te listen to him for ten minutes while he tells how he lost his dog and found him again.’ With the younger of the Russian children, Nelitschka, ‘ a little polyglot button’ of only two and a half, who spoke six languages, or fragments of them, Stevenson at once struck up a great friendship, and his letters for the next three months are full of her, and her sayings and doings.

She was almost, if not quite, the only very young child who ever came much under his notice after the days of his own boyhood, and she seems to have been so extraordinarily brilliant and fascinating a little creature that there is nothing to wonder at in the great attraction which she had for him. The ladies, moreover, were women of cultivation and refinement; full of spirits, and always devising fresh amusements: telling fortunes, writing characters, dancing Russian dances and singing Russian airs, and charmed, to Stevenson’s intense delight, by what he afterwards loved to call, with James Mohr, ‘the melancholy tunes of my native mountains.’ It was one of the episodes of real life; an introduction of characters, who never reappear in the story, an episode such as literature rejects; but it made Stevenson’s path smoother at a time when he was unable to climb steep places, and it took his thoughts off himself and hastened his recovery, while he was still unfit for prolonged exertion or any serious study.

Their circle was afterwards increased by the arrival of another friend of the Russians, the prince whose clever and voluble talk he has described in one of his letters, by whom he was nearly persuaded to take a course of Law, during the summer, at the University of Gottingen. In this time and place also began Stevenson’s friendship with Mr. Andrew Lang, who was then staying in the Riviera and one day called upon Mr. Colvin. The impression Stevenson produced was, Mr. Lang confesses, ‘ not wholly favourable’: —

‘A man of twenty-two, his smooth face, the more girlish by reason of his long hair, was hectic. Clad in a wide blue cloak, he looked nothing less than English, except Scotch.’ The impression received was that the other was ‘ Oxfordish’; but Mr. Lang may console himself with the thought that this was before he had avowed his preference for St. Andrews. In spite of so tepid a beginning the acquaintance prospered, and grew into a friendship which endured until the end.

When Mr. Colvin, after one brief absence, finally returned to England, his companion was already working again, though still far from strong. Even by the middle of March, he says that he is ‘ idle; but a man of eighty can’t be too active, and that is my age.’

As the days went on, it was time for him to turn northwards, but he was loth to go. He wrote to his mother ‘22nd Feb. 1874. — What keeps me here is just precisely the said society. These people are so nice and kind and intelligent, and then as I shall never see them any more, I have a disagreeable feeling about making the move. With ordinary people in England, you have always the chance of rencountering one another; at least you may see their death in the papers; but for these people, they die for me, and I die for them when we separate.’ On such terms he parted from them, not without the promise of a visit to their home in Poland, which, by no fault of his, was never accomplished.

In the beginning of April he reached Paris, and there found his cousin R. A. M. Stevenson, who had now taken up painting as a profession, and had been studying during the winter at Antwerp. This was Louis’ first independent acquaintance with Paris, and he delayed his return to Edinburgh till the end of the month, when the weather in the North might be more favourable. But this was only a measure of caution, and for several years to come we hear no more of his health as affecting his movements, or seriously hindering his work.

On his return home he found that many of his troubles had vanished. He had not of course solved the riddle of the universe, nor adjusted all contending duties, nor mastered all his impulses and appetites. He had not learned to handle his pen with entire precision, or to say exactly the thing he wished in the manner perfectly befitting it; nor was his way of life open before him. But his relations with his parents were on the old footing once more, and in the religious question a modus vivendi seems to have been established with his father. Probably nothing short of dogmatic orthodoxy would have given entire satisfaction, but at least this much already was gained, that the son’s character for honesty was established, and his desire for the truth fully recognised.

The question of his allowance was now reconsidered. The man who had been trusted freely with all the money necessary for his expensive sojourn abroad, could not be put back to his small pocket-money, and it was settled that in future he was to receive seven pounds a month, more even than he himself had thought of suggesting.

Money at his command and friends in the South forthwith changed his mode of life. For the whole seven years of the preceding period he had only crossed the Border thrice, but henceforth he was never continuously at home for more than three months at a time. Three springs and two autumns he spent in Edinburgh or at Swanston, but in the intervals his face became familiar in London, Paris, and the resorts of painters near Fontaine- bleau. But all the time he never went far afield, and between 1874 and 1879 seems not to have travelled further than three hundred miles from the English coast.

In Edinburgh his attention still had for some little time to be given to the study and pursuit of the law. All idea of the English Bar was apparently given up, and in the winter session of 1874 he resumed his attendance at the lectures of the University professors on Conveyancing, Scots Law, and Constitutional Law and History. On July 14, 1875, he successfully passed his Final Examination, and two days after was called to the Scottish Bar. On the 25th he had his first, complimentary brief, and the following day he sailed for London on his way to France. ‘Accept my hearty congratulations on being done with it,’ Jenkin wrote. ‘ I believe that is the view you like to take of the beginning you have just made.’ Stevenson returned, however, in the end of September, and during the next few months made some sort of effort to practise, although he does not seem to have impressed anybody outside his own family as being a serious lawyer. He frequented the great hall of the Parliament House, which, like Westminster in old days, is the centre of the courts, and the haunt of advocates waiting for business. The brass plate with his name, usual in Scotland, was affixed to the door of 17 Heriot Row, and he had the fourth or fifth share in the services of a clerk, whom it is alleged that he did not know by sight. He had in all four briefs, and the total of his fees never reached double figures. One piece of business might, he told me, have assumed real importance, but a compromise brought it to an end. ‘ If it had prospered/ he said,’ I might have stuck to the Bar, and then I suppose I should have been dead of the climate long ago.’