Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (1067 page)

The theatre was a source of great delight to him. Although he had read (and written) plays from his early years, had revelled in the melodramas of the toy-theatre, and had acted with the Jenkins and in other private theatricals, I find no reference to his having visited a theatre before December 1874, when he found Irving’s Hamlet4 interesting (for it is really studied) but not good’; and there is no sign of his having been really impressed until he saw Salvini as Macbeth at Edinburgh in the spring of 1876. Of this performance he wrote a criticism for the Academy, which he afterwards condemned as dealing with a subject that was still beyond the resources of his art.1 He himself, I am told, was never a tolerable actor, and certainly was never allotted a part of any importance. But his enthusiasm for the drama was great, and during these years was heightened and 1 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkirt, p. 145.

instructed by the two chief friends who shared his taste — Professor Jenkin and Mr. Henley.

He used to speak with delight of Delaunay’s performance in a play by Alexandre Dumas, Mademoiselle de Belleisle, declaring that in calling out through a window on the stage to some one supposed to be in the castle-court below, Delaunay had succeeded in so modulating his voice as ‘ to make you feel the cold night air and the moonlight.’

One of his visits to the theatre led to a very characteristic scene, described long afterwards in a letter to Mr. Archer. The play had been the De7ni-Monde of Dumas Jils} in the last act of which Olivier de Jalin employs an unworthy stratagem against the woman who had been his mistress.

‘ I came forth from that performance in a breathing heat of indignation. . . . On my way down the Frangais stairs, I trod on an old gentleman’s toes, whereupon, with that suavity which so well becomes me, I turned about to apologise, and on the instant, repenting me of that intention, stopped the apology midway, and added something in French to this effect: ‘ No, you are one of the laches who have been applauding that piece. I retract my apology.’ Said the old Frenchman, laying his hand on my arm, and with a smile that was truly heavenly in temperance, irony, good-nature, and knowledge of the world, ‘Ah, monsieur, vous etes bien jeune,’1

To this time also belongs the story reported by Mr. Andrew Lang.2 Stevenson, one day at a caf£, hearing a Frenchman say that the English were cowards, promptly hit him across the face. ‘Monsieur, vous m’avez frapp£!’ said the Gaul. ‘A ce qu’il parait,’ said the Scot, and there the incident ended. It is an instance the more of his fearlessness; for, besides his physical weakness, although he would never have hesitated, he was quite incompetent to fight a duel with either pistol or sword.

1 Letters, ii. 94.      2 North American Review, Feb. 1895.

The effect produced upon outsiders must sometimes have been rather bewildering. He used to tell how one day he and his cousin Bob, happening to be rather more in funds than usual, went to dine in one of the cafes of the Palais Royal. 4 The cafe was not very full/ so I remember the story,’and there was nobody near us, but presently a gentleman and his wife came in and sat down at the next table. They were evidently people of good position, well dressed and distinguished in appearance. But they were talking French, and we paid not the slightest attention to them. We had lately got hold of the works of Thomas Aquinas, and our conversation was on the most extraordinary medley of subjects — on men, women, and things, with a very large leaven of mediaeval theology, and on all we spoke in English with the most startling frankness and with the most bewildering transitions. Bob is the best talker in the world; I never knew him more brilliant, and I did my best.

‘ Those people sat and had their dinner and took not the slightest notice of us, but talked quietly to one another in Parisian French. Just before they got up to go, the gentleman turned to his wife and said to her in English without a trace of accent, “ My dear, won’t you take anything more? “ I have often wondered who they were, and what on earth they thought of us.’

His deficiencies in letter-writing and his protracted absences from home led very naturally to protests from his parents and especially from his mother. The answer was characteristic.

Euston Hotel, 16th Oct. 1874.

4 You must not be vexed at my absences. You must understand that I shall be a nomad, more or less, until my days be done. You don’t know how much I used to long for it in old days; how I used to go and look at the trains leaving, and wish to go with them. And now, you know, that I have a little more that is solid under my feet, you must take my nomadic habits as a part of me.

Just wait till I am in swing, and you will see that I shall pass more of my life with you than elsewhere; only take me as I am, and give me time. I must be a bit of a vagabond; it’s your own fault, after all, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have had a tramp for a son.’

While the man was in the making during these years, the writer also was passing through the stages of a development which was unusually protracted. The perfecting of his style was necessarily a work of time, but in the meanwhile, if he had seen his way to use the gifts at his command, his love of romance, his imagination, and his vivid interest in life might well have enabled him to produce work which would have secured him immediate popularity and reward.

Nothing of the sort, however, was accomplished, and, high as his standard always was, this delay may well have been a gain for his ultimate success. During the six years between his first appearance as a printed and paid author and the publication of the Travels with a Donkey, his published work consisted of some six-and- twenty magazine articles, chiefly critical and social essays, just half of which were in the Cornhill Magazine; two small books of travel; two books in serial instalments, afterwards reprinted; and five short stories also in periodicals. There were besides a few rejected articles, a certain amount of journalism, and at least eight stories or novels, none of which ever saw the light, as well as a play or two and some verses, a small part of which were ultimately included in his published works.

By this time Stevenson had left behind him the early stages of apprenticeship, and far as he still was from satisfying his own taste and aims, there is no longer any possibility of pointing out the definite stages through which he passed year by year, or the methods of work which he employed.

A list of his writings will be found in the appendix, arranged under separate years. It is therefore unnecessary in this place to do more than record his general progress, adding merely a detached note on any point of interest as it arises, or quoting his own criticisms, which, for the most part, are singularly shrewd and free from bias.

In September 1873 he wrote: ‘There is no word of “Roads”; I suspect the Saturday Review must have looked darkly upon it — so be it; we must just try to do something better/ And so, as we have seen, the article appeared in the Portfolio for December. Three weeks later, in a letter to his mother, he expressed the opinion that ‘it is quite the best thing I have ever done, to my taste. There are things expressed in it far harder to express than in anything else I ever had; and that, after all, is the great point. As for style, ga viendra peut-etre.’

In 1874 he had five articles in four different magazines: these included ‘ Ordered South’ in Macmillarts, and, still more important, the paper on ‘ Victor Hugo’s Romances’ in the Cornhill. The former, which took him three months to write, was his first work ever republished in its original form; the latter, which was anonymous, but afterwards reappeared in Familiar Studies of Men and Books, marked, in his own judgment, the beginning of his command of style. Long afterwards in Samoa, in answer to a question, he told me that in this essay he had first found himself able to say several things in the way in which he felt they should be said. It may also be noticed that this was his first appearance in the magazine which by the discernment of Mr. Leslie Stephen did so much for him in taking his early work.

This year he proposed to himself, and began to read for, a book on four great Scotsmen — Knox, Hume, Burns, and Scott. All that ever came of it, and he had the subjects a long time in his mind, were the essays on Burns and Knox, which dealt only with one aspect of either character At this time he was working at an essay on Walt Whitman, but his views did not find expression till 1878. The papers on Knox were read before the Speculative Society in November 1874 and January 1875. Late in the former year he was making another assault upon the stronghold of the Novel with a tale called ‘When the Devil was Well,’ dealing with the adventures of an Italian sculptor of the fifteenth century. It was finished the next year, and the unfavourable opinion of his friends was accepted as final.

1875 saw nothing published except two double articles, the ‘Autumn Effect’ and ‘ Knox,’ the notice of B£ranger in the Encyclopedia Britannica,, and the pamphlet entitled An Appeal to the Clergy of the Church of Scotland. This last had been set up in type the preceding autumn, and was an appeal to the Scottish clergy to use the Church Patronage Act of 1874 as an opportunity for effacing differences between their own communion and the dissenting bodies, and to do all in their power to restore religious unity.

In January 1875 Stevenson proposed to The Academy a series of papers on the Parnassiens — de Banville, Coppee, Soulary, and Prudhomme — and when this was not accepted, he devoted a good deal of his time to the study of the French literature of the fifteenth century, which resulted in the articles on Villon and Charles of Orleans. He was filled with enthusiasm for Joan of Arc, a devotion and also a cool-headed admiration which he never lost. He projected a series of articles which should include the Maid, Louis XI., and Ren£ of Anjou. The same reading led to the experiments in the French verse metres of that date which were almost contemporary with the work of Mr. Andrew Lang and Mr. Austin Dobson, who brought the Ballade and Rondeau back to favour in England. Stevenson, however, never published any of these attempts, and except two translations published in the Letters, and one set preserved by Mr. Lang, I believe the characteristic verses at the head of this chapter are the only finished piece which survives.

A prose poem on ‘ The Spirit of the Spring’ unfortunately went astray, but one or two short studies of the same date and in a similar vein indicate that it was no masterpiece. After the Italian story was finished, he took up one of his old tales called The Country Dance, which likewise came to nothing; and also wrote The Story of King Matthias’ Hunting Horn, of which I only know that it was ‘ wild and fantastic.’

As the result of a condensation of Burns’s life and a criticism of his works for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the famous Scotsmen had now become ‘ Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns.’ The editor of the Encyclopedia found the Burns too critical, and too much at variance with the accepted Scottish tradition, and though payment was made for it, it was not used. Stevenson wrote: ‘ 8th June 1876. — I suppose you are perfectly right in saying there was a want of enthusiasm about the article. To say truth, I had, I fancy, an exaggerated idea of the gravity of an encyclopaedia, and wished to give mere bones, and to make no statements that should seem even warm. And perhaps also, I may have a little latent cynicism, which comes out when I am at work. I believe you are right in saying I had not said enough of what is highest and best in him. Such a topic is disheartening; the clay feet are easier dealt with than the golden head.’

To 1876 we owe the only piece of dramatic criticism that Stevenson ever published, and four articles in the Cornhill Magazine, which from this time onward marked all his contributions to its pages with the initials R. L. S. The full names of a few very eminent authors had been given from the commencement; but about the beginning of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s editorship, in 1871, a second rank of distinction was established by allowing an equally small number of writers to denote their articles by their initials. All Stevenson’s papers except the first (1874J were thus distinguished; and though the R L. S. caused them at first to be frequently attributed to the editor, yet it was under these initials that Stevenson first won recognition in the select circle which knew and appreciated literature.

A novel, The Hair Trunk, or The Ideal Commonwealth, was begun and partly carried out at this time. A party of friends meeting at Cambridge proposes to form a colony, which is to be established in ‘ Navigator’s Island ‘ — Samoa, of all places — of which the author had heard only the year before from his connection, the Hon. J. Seed, formerly Secretary to the Customs and Marine Departments of New Zealand,1 who had been sent to report upon the islands by the New Zealand Government. In the Windbound Arethusa was another attempt of the same date which attained no better result.

The year 1876 thrice saw the rejection of the article on ‘ Some Portraits by Raeburn,’ afterwards included in Virginibus Puerisque. It was refused in turn by the Cornhill\ the Pall Mall Gazette, and Blackwoods Magazine, though it is only fair to Mr. Stephen to say that he helped the author in trying to place it elsewhere. It was seldom that Stevenson either continued, or was driven, to try his fortune elsewhere with a rejected article. But this case is all the more interesting because he tried again and again, and was clearly in the right. Editors cannot always follow their judgment or their inclinations, but articles such as the Raeburn seldom come their way.

The event of the year was, of course, the canoe voyage. Stevenson, as we have already seen, had for some time shared his friends’ taste for navigating the Firth of Forth in these craft, which the enthusiasm of ‘Rob Roy’ Macgregor had made popular ten years before. A good deal of time was spent, as we have seen, on the river at Grez, and canoes were introduced there by the English colony, headed by Sir Walter Simpson and his brother, 1 Letters, i. 95.

and by R. A. M. Stevenson, who devised a leather canoe of his own ‘ with a niche for everything/ and, as his friends said,’ a place for nothing.’ Mr. Warington Baden-Powell had published in the pages of the Cornhill Magazine in 1870 the log of the Nautilus and Isis canoes on a journey through Sweden and on the Baltic. But the idea of the journey itself seems to have been suggested by Our Autumn Holiday on French Rivers, by Mr. J. L. Molloy, published in 1874, the account of a journey up the Seine and down the Loire in a four-oared outrigger.